Nodes That Find Themselves

A little beacon so a machine that reboots into a new IP is never lost.

Home networks are honest about one thing: DHCP will move your machines. A server that answered at one address yesterday quietly jumps to another today, and suddenly the dashboard thinks it is dead. (It happened here. More than once.)

The fix is a small beacon on every node — a few dozen lines of standard library, no dependencies. On boot and every few minutes after, it reports its hostname and every address it has to the control center, which updates that node's record automatically. It prefers the node's Tailscale address, because that one is stable forever.

The neat part: the control center never rewrites the hand-authored inventory. The beacon's reports are layered on top, so the human file stays the source of truth and the machine-managed addresses just ride along. A node can vanish and reappear at a new address, and the Lab simply shrugs and keeps working.