[Greg McKaskle]

DHCP manages a menial task of assigning and tracking a numeric IP address that are routable. DNS and mDNS let you name the IP and reference it using the name.

If you are writing code using IP addresses, then DHCP complicates matters. If you write code where the addresses are meaningful address names, then the code is more readable, more portable, less brittle, and DHCP really doesn't help or hurt. Used together, and you have a more modern, in my opinion, a more convenient and flexible system.

I also expect things to further improve. Not everything was able to get done in one year. The Axis camera didn't get renamed by the imaging tool this year, which added a manual step, complicating matters a bit. We also didn't have mDNS service lookup to find all Axis cameras. Once either one of these is in place, IP cameras will be smoother.

You may use static IPs, but I do not miss having to dig into the Windows control panel to modify my IP several times a day in order to get on the internet or connect to the robot/camera. Scripts for connecting to the networks are slightly better, but still nowhere as convenient as using Bonjour or mDNS, and letting my computer do the menial tasks.

The problems I'm generally seeing is when teams have a mix of static and dynamic IPs. I've seen many instances where instead of setting the host name, a well-intentioned team sets the Axis camera to a static IP. This doesn't fix the problem, and in fact, complicates it further.

Greg McKaskle