Everyone was kind enough to ram my brain chock full of knowledge about switches and I came away feeling like I can explain it to other people. (please don’t test me on this, I’ll fail)
But now I’m trying to figure out how I want my network to look and so it’s best I ask the people smarter than me that actually understand what I’m trying to do.
My house is an average sized, end of terrace in a big city and so while I can get decent Internet speeds, I get lots of WiFi signal congestion with neighbours, buildings, etc.
In my present router, which I really need to replace, I have my NAS and cable box plugged in via Ethernet, everything else is connected via WiFi. That’s a bunch of phones, a couple laptops, and a couple Raspberry Pi’s (including my one with all my home services, like Home Assistant and my Pi-Hole).
The design I’m cooking up, is that my NAS would be on a virtual LAN with no direct access to the Internet, my Raspberry Pis would have Internet access. I don’t need to worry about my smart home devices having Internet access since they’re all Zigbee devices. But I plan to switch my cable box to an IPTV box and I’m also wanting to get a video doorbell and security camera for the garden, so that’s at least three virtual local area networks. Four if I add a guest network.
My questions are really simple ones and you’re probably gonna laugh at how stupid they are… can I do this all with a single switch? Do I need a separate access points for each VLAN or can I have multiple vLANs on a single AP? How many ports should I be looking at on my switch? Would four be enough for my set-up? Also managed is best right?
No problem! Have fun with your VLANs and WAP. It’s the most stable Wi-Fi I’ve ever owned. I used to have to reboot my ISP Wi-Fi router once a month or so because it would just stop serving Wi-Fi for no reason. I’ve never had to reboot my ubiquiti gear ever for that reason, and it’s been years.
Let us know what you pick for a router when you get there.
Don’t get me started on the router. I really want an ARM router and was dead set on a NanoPi but got swayed by the Banana Pi BPi-R4, but I’ve been reading the support thread on the OpenWRT forums and things aren’t where they need to be yet. Luckily I can sort out everything else first and leave the router for last, if the worse comes to the worst, I’ll just get an n100 machine.
Nice. I dunno if I’d do ARM again for me personally, I always found the throughput lacking, but I suppose there’s newer faster stuff now, and it’s hard to complain about the low power consumption.
If you have any old x86 gear laying around, or even the means to make a VM, consider installing and playing around with pfSense or opnSense. I suppose your goal may be to get into the OpenWrt ecosystem and tinker in there, which I totally get.
For me, I’ve taken to shying away from an “everything device” that can be a router and NAS and server and whatever else device (not to say that’s your intent with OpenWrt), and instead choosing something that is focused on the networking. Do one job and do it well, kinda thing. For instance my spouse would be mad if a video call with friends was jittery because the router was busy transcoding video from its media server to play a show on the TV. Also if the device gives up the ghost years down the line, you don’t have to find some unicorn hardware in a hurry that can do 5 different things; you can just get a router and drop it in. Food for thought.