Should Director have IP Reservation?

[ekohn00]

7 hours ago, JSTRONG said:

Just to clarify. If your network crashes and your router and switches are down, you will lose Everything communicating over your network regardless if you have static or dhcp

Most likely scenario for this is a power failure.  
if your router and switches crash at the same time you got serious problems.  
 

 

[ekohn00]

10 hours ago, JSTRONG said:

I prefer reservations so the devices can be organized, sorted and tracked in the router. 
 

Everyone has a preference, but it’s better to have network equipment, servers, etc use static addresses.  It prevents a lot of problems.  Or like a router that goes down and take the addresses with it. 

[ekohn00]

3 hours ago, BraydonH said:

I actually think static IPs can cause alot of issues over time as gear gets swapped out and routers change.

DHCP reservation all the way in my opinion. I have basically never used a static IP in my life. DHCP reservations are much easier and very good from my experience.

Also make sure your controllers DNS is manually set to 8.8.8.8 for best performance.

Actually static is safer with swapping gear, since you won’t make a mistake by changing the wrong reservation. If you swap gear, you just reuse the gears up address. 
 

most likely you’ve used a static- your router typically has a static. 
 

best practice on network gear is to use static - it prevents network problems for when dhcp servers crash or become unreachable   
 

 

 

[JSTRONG]

There was a time I would primarily use mostly static ip addresses. And keep it all organized. 

Network gear gets between .1-.20

audio video between 21-50

Control systems .51-.60

touch panels .61-.80

etc etc

It becomes tedious especially for a residential project. And what happens in a couple of years when your range wasn’t large enough? 
For net engineers that keep logs of their networks , this would not be a problem. 

 

 

[JSTRONG]

Eko, yes agreed networking equipment use static. But for me everything else simply press a button and  reserve it. 

[ekohn00]

1 hour ago, JSTRONG said:

There was a time I would primarily use mostly static ip addresses. And keep it all organized. 

Network gear gets between .1-.20

audio video between 21-50

Control systems .51-.60

touch panels .61-.80

etc etc

It becomes tedious especially for a residential project. And what happens in a couple of years when your range wasn’t large enough? 
For net engineers that keep logs of their networks , this would not be a problem. 

 

 

It might be a bit more tedious to set up at first, but the static is there to prevent countless hours of trouble resolution.

Personally I don't see it being tedious to get devices up and running using DHCP and then change them to static. A few more steps, but simple.

There are also a lot of home routers that don't do reservations.... Not to mention if you had to swap your router you'd have to redo all that work.

 

[Don Cohen]

OP here: appreciate all the replies - interesting discussion!

[zaphod]

FYI - while we are on the issue of networking I want to give a plug to Fingbox.  This is a device about the size of a hockey puck (or Echo Dot but being Canadian I am forced to use the hockey puck analogy) that monitors your network.  You can set it up to notify you when new devices join your LAN or when devices drop off the LAN.  It also has other (controversial) features like blocking devices from your LAN.

[Amr]

14 hours ago, zaphod said:

FYI - while we are on the issue of networking I want to give a plug to Fingbox.  This is a device about the size of a hockey puck (or Echo Dot but being Canadian I am forced to use the hockey puck analogy) that monitors your network.  You can set it up to notify you when new devices join your LAN or when devices drop off the LAN.  It also has other (controversial) features like blocking devices from your LAN.

The Pro version Domotz have a C4 driver

[zaphod]

6 hours ago, Amr said:

And it has a C4 driver

Really?  I don't see anything when I search the driver database.

[Amr]

It’s my bad it’s not Fingbox and it’s not in the driver database. If you have their pro version, i.e. Domotz it do have a C4 driver for Violet and an IOS app as well via Domotz websit.

[zaphod]

There is now a (or maybe even two) drivers for Unifi that give some similar functionality.

[SMHarman]

Yep. Reserved or set as fixed.

My dealer blocks the first 100 IPs. Then puts different devices on the different blocks of 10

Controllers on 99 down
Networking on 10 down
TV devices on 40 down
Infrastructure on 20 down
And so on with Amps and other things I forget where.

[jlemonakis]

On 5/25/2020 at 12:14 PM, lippavisual said:

Your controller running director should be set statically.  I’d also advise any other C4 equipment to be static as well.

This way if your network crashes, router dies, whatever, your system will still chug along happily and keep working.

There have been many complaints about systems slowing to a crawl or just stop working when ISP services go down.  Mostly do to using ISP provided gear or keeping equipment on DHCP and router craps out.

Doing the above solves the problem.

 

 

No it doesn't anymore unfortunately. We always set C4 and other networking/AV equipment as a static out of range, and have noticed a lot recently that systems are becoming unresponsive or not functioning correctly (even just core C4 stuff that has nothing to do with Internet access). Apparently C4s stance is that the thing that can cause this now are some 3rd party drivers or cloud driver managers etc. 

[lippavisual]

Using standard C4 supplied drivers, the above is still true.

Use of 3rd party drivers that rely on either cloud connections or others will bog your system down because it's no longer getting responses from the servers.  This is all dependent on how the developer creates the drivers.  Some are better than others.

Personally, I don't install anything that relies on a cloud connection.