Ecclestoned

My concern is that the Shelly won't be able to tell if the ice machine is on or off. The automation would be something like "toggle the ice machine" vs "turn the ice machine on".

If there is some way I could wire a Shelly sense pin to the ice machine controller and tell it to use that to tell whether toggling would turn it on or off. IDK

Damn this is so much simpler than the USB 2 version I have from 8 years ago...

make are the controller gas a static IP -- not a static DHCP lease

Ahhh that makes complete sense. I'll look into it. Thanks!

Damn, I didn't realize the amount of hate for DHCP. Ive used an already configured system with a DHCP/DNS server set up and it was super easy to manage. Want to change or add a static IP? Edit the text file, add the MAC, reload.

I didn't know this wasn't reflective of the overall experience.

Already done, but I ran into issues when I needed to change the IP or MAC.

Is there any specific reason you need DHCP to assign an IP to your main hosting server vs setting it all statically?

I've done this. I think the real problem is if I ever change the server MAC or IP, as now the unifi server isn't picked up by the USG, which means I can't change the static address.

So this is where I'm a little confused. The USG had the option to assign a static IP (which I've done), but if you ever need to CHANGE that IP... Chaos. From what I understand the USG needs to propagate that IP to all your devices, but it uses the controller to do that. Then you also run into issues with IP leases having to time out. Same problem occurs if I ever upgrade my server and change out the MAC address. Because now the IP is assigned to the old MAC.

I'm not sure if there's any way around this. But it basically locks me in to keeping the controller (and thus my server) at a single, fixed IP, without any chance of changing it.

I've completely bricked two SD cards using a Pi. The USB option sounds interesting, I'll have to try it.