VLANs are absolutely not a requirement to stream music, but nor is security in any form. It’s a bit like saying brakes (or maybe more appropriately a safety belt) aren’t a requirement to drive fast. True on one level, but maybe abstracting away some of the other considerations. And I agree with you that VLANs are maybe “A-level” stuff which I wasn’t planning on diving into until much later on. I also agree with @Chocky that VLANs aren’t infallible. Nor is a Chubb lock, but it’s better than a Yale and a damn sight better than no lock at all.
Mrs Struts used to work in market research and they have a saying there “where you sit is where you stand”, which for the non-native English speakers roughly translates to "your views and opinions almost invariably correlate to your position in society (geographically, socio-economically etc.). In your case @Phil I can’t help thinking that your views on simplicity are heavily coloured by the types of problems that cause the average customer to contact dCS support. Your points are well argued and well taken but I still do not buy that the simplest solution is always the best and that one size fits all. There are just too many other factors at play here as I’ve tried to illustrate.
Totally agree with your second point. On the first one I agree it’s a risk, but I opened this thread to create awareness about some of the issues and share ideas on how best to solve them. Nobody is compelled to read it or follow any of the advice here. I am truly surprised at the level of sophistication here, but clearly this thread has attracted the vanishingly small percentage of Phil 's "Group 3"s among the random collection of audiophiles that make up the forum readership and maybe that was inevitable. I was thinking of starting with some more basic topics (unfortunately Phil “stole” many of them in a great post in another thread) and gently working forwards from there, maybe that was naïve. Angus’s point about disabling or changing the passwords on default administrator accounts on anything and everything connected to the network is IMO the best advice here so far, but yes, someone somewhere is bound to find even that confusing or screw it up.
At the end of the day we’re all consenting adults and everyone needs to take responsibility for their decisions on their level of sophistication and ambition relative to their technical abilities. I hope nobody ties themselves in knots as a result of following any of the advice here. But I am also convinced that if folks disregard it, whether through ignorance or a conscious decision (especially some of the points about security), they could end up deeper in the pit of misery than they ever imagined possible, and streaming music will be the very least of their problems.
But these are all great points and something for all of us to bear in mind as we share ideas and experience here going forwards.