I’m setting up DHCP reservations on my home network and came up with a simple schema to identify devices: .100 is for desktops, .200 for mobiles, .010 for my devices, .020 for my wife’s, and so on. Does anyone else use schemas like this? I’ve also got .local DNS names for each device, but having a consistent schema feels nice to be able to quickly identify devices by their IPs.
They are not hard once you grasp the idea. They are like separate networks on layer 2(link) - layer 1 (physical) can be shared.
So you get several separate networks for the price (and equipment) of one. If you want to reach a device on one vlan from another it needs to be forwarded by something.
It gets a bit complicated here - as your idea of the network is on layer 4 where tcp and udp and other protocols live. As you don’t want to connect one vlan to the other - you want something that has access to both vlans to forward your layer 3 data (IP) between the links. This is your router. It will have a virtual network card on each vlan. You can tell your router to send data from one network card to the other to forward the data.
I suck at explaining- so you probably better off doing an Udemy network primer or read up a little bit. Good things to understand are the first 4 layers of osi model and routing.
It’s not hard and you can learn how to use it by poking stuff and googling a bit. Just imagine each vlan as a “copy” of your equipment (layer 1) cables and all. Your switch will have to support it, and if you want to trunk (run several vlans though one link) you need support on the other end as well.
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