DHCP Reservations is saving an IP address that goes along with a Mac Address. Making the device have a static IP on your network. This can be done by using your Router and going under a section by the heading "DHCP Reservation." Mine happened to look like:
It was also on the first page loaded up on my routers configuration page. I have a Cisco E3000 router.
My issue lately has been I use my local network for all sorts of things.
- Work
- Web Server
- Running a VM of a product I work on for Shore Group.
- Streaming Video
- Internet
- And so on!
I have a total of 3 machines running to work and do at lease 3-4 of the above. My Mac Mini does basically all of that above. It has a VirtualBox running Ubuntu for the product I am working on for ShoreGroup that has its own IP address. This needing to be available to the outside world for testing. (Its not running on port 80!!!) I also use an additional two labtops to develop on and rsync between the two often.
In the last two weeks I found my local IP addresses reseting and changing. The cause has been either needing to reboot the router, circuit breaker being tripped, and so on! And this caused me to have to go and do ifconfig on all 4 devices so I could continue working. Along with that needing to change the IP of my port forwarding to make my VM accessible. So you can see why having these 4 devices with static IP can save time... As when my IP's reset I am looking at an additional 5-10 minutes to reconfigure everything.
By setting this reservation up I don't have to go into Terminal and manually set a static ip. And by doing it via the router I don't have to worry about IP Address conflicts.
Terms:
DHCP: The Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) is a network configuration protocol for hosts on Internet Protocal (IP) networks.
Mac Address: A Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique network identifier for your computer, device, network interface.
