2 posts tagged with "Tips and Tricks"

When running Educates locally on macOS, your cluster's accessibility depends on your machine's IP address. Every time you move between networks — home, office, conference WiFi — your IP changes. DNS resolution breaks, cluster ingresses stop responding, and workshop URLs go stale. This can be a hassle — especially when you don't immediately realize the IP changed and spend time debugging something else entirely. You end up manually updating the resolver configuration before you can get back to work.

In the How to best work locally post, we showed how to configure a local DNS resolver with a recognizable domain like educates.test. And in Automating DNS Resolver Updates, we covered how to detect IP changes and re-sync the resolver automatically. Both of those approaches react to the IP change after it happens. The approach in this post eliminates the change altogether. A better approach is to prevent the problem entirely: give your machine a fixed IP that never changes, regardless of which physical network you're on.

When developing with Educates on a local machine, many developers rely on the local DNS resolver functionality to provide their Educates cluster with a meaningful hostname. A common approach is to use a domain like educates.test for consistent local cluster access.

However, laptop users frequently encounter network transitions—moving between office, home, conference, or other network environments. These transitions result in IP address changes that break DNS resolution for the configured hostname. When this occurs, the cluster becomes inaccessible via the expected domain name, requiring manual DNS resolver updates.

This issue can be particularly frustrating when the DNS resolver is running in the background, as the root cause may not be immediately apparent. To address this challenge, I developed an automated solution that monitors IP address changes and updates the DNS resolver configuration accordingly.