Pow sites require net access (DNS)

[briandoll]

I noticed that Pow-hosted sites don't immediately work in the browser when you're offline. Adding a specific entry to your hosts file will enable that specific site, but then you're mucking around in your hosts file for every name.dev site.

I wonder if there is a way (firewall rule perhaps?) to bind *.dev to 127.0.0.1 during the Pow install? Unfortunately you can't use wildcards in /etc/hosts files.

[josephers]

There's a workaround to create an ad hoc network, with issue #104.

But I think that's rather ugly.

[dlee]

I often run into this. What's the underlying cause, and how does a /etc/hosts entry or an ad hoc network work around this?

[sstephenson]

Yeah, this really sucks. It seems to be a limitation of OS X that we can't do anything about. Possibly some optimization that disables name resolution when you don't have an active network link.