Dedicated IP Addresses for Network Devices

[lajackson]

I have not yet reloaded it but will do so later this week.

No, actually, I won't. I forgot that I have to

travel to the stake center,
power up the Teradek VidiU encoder and
get it functioning on the network,
have the firewall look for it and snag the MAC address (it is not good enough for me to type it in,
although I understand the error avoidance benefit of reading it via the network),
assign the MAC address to a new IP (because it will not come up on the one I will assign),
reboot the encoder to verify that it will be assigned to the correct IP address,
and finally turn off the encoder, go home, and hope it sticks until stake conference.

Or there will be two more extra boots of the encoder to do it again.
And another unplanned trip to the stake center, where I do not attend meetings very regularly.

[CalS201]

Just as a point of reference for webcasting, our stake has used Win7+encoder, and then the Teradek for the last 9 years. Additionally, we have 4 bldgs in the stake and rotate the conference origin bldg every 6 months. We have not had any transmitting problems (knock on wood). We have always used un-reserved DHCP address assignment.

[lajackson]

We have always used un-reserved DHCP address assignment.

I have done that successfully, also. However, it is much nicer to find the VidiU where it is expected and already have the bookmarks set in the browsers that will be used to control and monitor the webcast. It saves the trouble of drilling down through the box menu to find the IP address where it landed. Of course, we originate from the stake center and do not rotate meetinghouses, so that also makes it easier for us.

I work with some assistants who are very willing and are quick learners, but still do not understand why an IP address even matters, even when I explain it to them using telephone number terminology.

[danpass]

I have not yet reloaded it but will do so later this week.

No, actually, I won't. I forgot that I have to

travel to the stake center,
power up the Teradek VidiU encoder and
get it functioning on the network,
have the firewall look for it and snag the MAC address (it is not good enough for me to type it in,
although I understand the error avoidance benefit of reading it via the network),
assign the MAC address to a new IP (because it will not come up on the one I will assign),
reboot the encoder to verify that it will be assigned to the correct IP address,
and finally turn off the encoder, go home, and hope it sticks until stake conference.

Or there will be two more extra boots of the encoder to do it again.
And another unplanned trip to the stake center, where I do not attend meetings very regularly.

Yeah, I had hoped to be able to re-assign IP addresses from home, but discovered that it wasn't possible unless the devices are currently powered up and on the network.

Suggestion to developers:
If you won't allow the manual entry of a MAC address for an IP assignment, why not at least allow past assignments to be reinstated.
TM knows about past IP assignments made, given they can be viewed using the Action History feature. In our case, the history doesn't list assignments that were made prior to October, but it does show one that I added in October, which as I mentioned in an earlier post, has since been lost.

[jaredhh36]

We have a proposed fix to all known bugs/behaviors causing assigned IP reservations to be lost. It is currently planned to go live Friday morning 2/14 (Happy Valentine's!). Please feel free to re-test after that, unless you hear from me otherwise.

[jaredhh36]

Has anyone been able to re-enter their devices into the reserved IP Assignments list? I would love some feedback if you've tried this again.

I put one in on Jan. 9 and it stayed in through our changes on Feb. 14, plus during more changes that we did a week or so later; so we're feeling good about it. Plus we have a few other live networks we tested on and they are working 100%.

Dan - regarding your feedback, I did some research:

If you won't allow the manual entry of a MAC address for an IP assignment, why not at least allow past assignments to be reinstated.

First, regarding the manual entry of MAC addresses: The main developer told me that TM interacts directly with Meraki's API and we currently do not have a solution to help you/ourselves if a MAC address gets entered incorrectly. So unfortunately for now we cannot take that chance and are only allowing the system to detect and register the MAC address.

Second, regarding the suggestion to pull from history: This should be doable; I'll submit the feature request to our TM dev team and they'll add it to their list of to-do items. Now I'm not sure when it will happen, so for now we'll have to keep with the old way of connecting the device to the network and registering it in TM while it's on and connected.

[danpass]

Thank you for explaining the reason for not allowing manual MAC entry and for considering the suggestion.

I added assignments on Jan 14, Feb 6 and Feb 13. All 3 are still configured. Thanks for your work resolving this issue.

[lajackson]

I entered an IP assignment on January 17 that is still showing.