A technician asked me the other day, elbow-deep in a rack of TIOs, to explain the difference between static, DHCP, and link-local. So I told him to picture a hotel. DHCP is the front desk. You walk up, check in, and the receptionist hands you a room number. Static is when you already know your room — you walk straight past the desk and go up. And link-local? That's when a whole crowd shows up, the receptionist is nowhere to be found, so everyone agrees among themselves who takes which room. No front desk, no waiting — they just sort it out.
That picture is also how I build a network — because the truth on a real show is that half the gear isn't mine. What I own gets a static IP — I control it, so I assign it. Laptops, AVIO adapters, rented and subcontracted boxes get DHCP, because I don't have the authority to reconfigure someone else's device, and I shouldn't pretend I do. That's not giving up control; it's being honest about where my control ends. And it keeps the system flexible — gear can come and go without me re-addressing the world. Then I make the network explain itself. I run a wide /16 and address everything as 192.168.[type].[device]. The third number tells me what a thing is — one range is Shure, another is L-Acoustics, another something else — so I read an address and instantly know the brand and the role, before I open any software. The last number is just that device's number. And because my DHCP pool lives in its own range, I can see at a glance which devices are static and which are dynamic. The address tells the story. Keep it simple, and name things so the next person can read them. A network you can read at a glance is a network you can fix at a glance. How do you handle a network when half the gear isn't yours?