and connect to it with an iPad that has a Jellyfin client installed?

In my experience, you don’t even need the dedicated Jellyfin client. Just opening it up in a web browser works out of the box, so that’s potentially one less thing to download/install/manage for the clients.

That said, I’ve never tried to access Jellyfin from an iPad/iPhone/Mac so it might not be as seamless as my experiences on Android/Linux based devices. But I imagine they’d be fine; just test it out before you hit the road.

Hmm, have you made any changes to the firewall on the system hosting the Docker container?

You might need to edit the firewall with a something like this:

sudo ufw allow from 192.168.1.0/24 to any port 8096

Are you using docker-compose to run the Jellyfin service? If so, you might need to add something like this to the docker-compose.yml file:

network_mode: 'host'
extra_hosts:
      - "host.docker.internal:host-gateway"

I’m no expert at Docker or UFW, but these are part of my Jellyfin setup, which I’m running on Ubuntu LTS in a Docker container.

Are you putting the port number at the end of the local IP? Jellyfin defaults to port 8096 iirc. So the server URL should be 192.168.0.5:8096. What happens if you input that?

Are you able to connect to the server via web browser? e.g., typing http://192.168.0.5:8096 into Firefox

And as a quick sanity check, is your phone connected to the same wifi network as the Jellyfin server?

Ohh, I’m dumb

Any immutable distro, Debian, Ubuntu, all their derivatives

Debian and Ubuntu are not immutable distributions by default, unless I am mistaken.