I’m not sure if this is the right community, but the home networking magazines seem to be pretty dead. I’m a bit green with regard to networking, and am looking for help to see if the plan I’ve come up with will work.
The main image in the post is my current network setup. Basically the ISP modem/router is just a pass through and the 10 Gb port is connected to my Asus router, which has the DHCP server activated. All of my devices, home lab and smart home devices are connected to the Asus router via either Wifi or Ethernet. This works well, but I have many neighbours close by, and with my 30+ wifi devices, I think things aren’t working as well as they could be. I guess you could say one of my main motivations to start messing with this is to clean it up and move all possible devices to Ethernet.
The planned new setup is as follows, but I’m not sure if it’s even possible to function this way.
ISP modem/router > 2.5 Gb unmanaged switch > 2.5 Gb capable devices (NAS, hypervisor, PCs) will connect directly here, along with a 1 Gb managed switch to handle the DHCP > Asus router would connect to the managed switch to provide wifi, and remaining wired devices will all connect to the managed switch as well.
Looks like it’ll work. You should look into flashing that router with openwrt or pfsense and VLANing off those smart devices… They can be a security issue.
Also adding a second AP that you place on a different channel for guest and untrusted devices would work and increase bandwidth, but adds some routing complexity.
Ooookay… Took me a second to wrap my head around the layout… Originally I only looked at the picture, which only shows a single switch.
This is an odd topography. Typically when working with switches, you want them connecting directly to the router and not connected to another switch.
You are going to have bandwidth issues out the ass, along with having a troubleshooting nightmare when something goes wrong and you need to trace packets.
Right now you have a hub and a spoke inside a hub and spoke.
Since it looks like your Asus is just an AP in this scenario, you’d be better off:
hooking both switches to the ISP router
enabling DHCP on the ISP router for the 2.5g switch
set your 1g switch to a different subnet, with default gateway to your ISP router
enable dhcp for different subnet
add Asus for WiFi ability on new subnet
You can then play around with VLANing on the managed switch. You won’t be able to separate IoT and Personal WiFi signals with VLAN. Youd need to create a guest SSID for that functionality and change the channels to 6 and 11 so you get good bandwidth
Edit: this is assuming you have a layer 3 switch, if its a layer 2 I would use the Asus as a router/AP and hook it directly to the ISP router and hook the switch up to the Asus.
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Looks like it’ll work. You should look into flashing that router with openwrt or pfsense and VLANing off those smart devices… They can be a security issue.
Also adding a second AP that you place on a different channel for guest and untrusted devices would work and increase bandwidth, but adds some routing complexity.
The router runs Asuswrt-Merlin, but unfortunately the RT-86U doesn’t provide VLANs with Merlin, and there is no openwrt port for it.
You think it should work though with the router being placed after the switch and handling DHCP?
Ooookay… Took me a second to wrap my head around the layout… Originally I only looked at the picture, which only shows a single switch.
This is an odd topography. Typically when working with switches, you want them connecting directly to the router and not connected to another switch.
You are going to have bandwidth issues out the ass, along with having a troubleshooting nightmare when something goes wrong and you need to trace packets.
Right now you have a hub and a spoke inside a hub and spoke.
Since it looks like your Asus is just an AP in this scenario, you’d be better off:
You can then play around with VLANing on the managed switch. You won’t be able to separate IoT and Personal WiFi signals with VLAN. Youd need to create a guest SSID for that functionality and change the channels to 6 and 11 so you get good bandwidth
Edit: this is assuming you have a layer 3 switch, if its a layer 2 I would use the Asus as a router/AP and hook it directly to the ISP router and hook the switch up to the Asus.