Quote Originally Posted by SparkyCoog View Post
That's my biggest worry.

To be honest, I really like the way one of the Lutron competitors does things where they have an LCD screen on their processor and you can manually pick DHCP or static IP address ON THE PROCESSOR without even needing the software. It makes life so much easier because I can just see what DHCP picked for the processor right there on the LCD screen and type it in their design software manually...
It's a trade-off between making the device a lot more expensive (which rings hollow with Lutron pricing sometimes) or making the software on the device more robust. If the firmware on a device isn't very smart AND there's other reasons to have a display, yeah, I'd prefer seeing it there too. But given the really infrequent number of times you should ever have to do this it's kinda hard justifying the expense of adding a display for this alone.

Trouble is fancy stuff like multicast and other network features have to be working reliably in order to hide all the messy configuration bits. Not all routers do this, or many get misconfigured or have the features disabled because of other factors.

When it works it's pretty slick. When it doesn't it really requires seeing the big picture to avoid making it worse. I feel for the Lutron support folks. It's tough trying to narrow down the problems without having to point out the problems caused by everything else. All too often networks are lashed together in "barely working" condition. One little thing causes it to freak out (aka Sonos and STP issues).

It's not anybody's fault, per se, just the result of decades worth of misunderstandings and misconfigurations. What "worked before you connected THAT" didn't really work all that well, nobody actually checked/noticed. But that new gizmo just became the spotlight shining a light on the mess. I hate being the one that discovers this because it's going to burn up a lot of time and involve lots of potential finger-pointing.

So, yeah, I feel for ya.