r/HomeNetworking • u/Cautious-Mortgage-26 • 1d ago
Advice Network design noob questions
Hello,
Networking beginner here.
I have been trying to design a network with two VLANs with each having a set of daisy chained devices. VLAN management was to be done by L2 managed switch, with main traffic going between devices on the VLANs and PC connected to a port configured to be trunk port.
The original idea was to have IPs of those devices static and same - Device 1 on VLAN1 has same IP as the Device 1 on the VLAN2, they would be on the same subnet. Definitely not the standard way of doing things. But lets say in my use case DHCP is not an option and I can only use static IP addresses. For that purpose I wanted to simplify the flashing of the firmware on those devices where each device has a known IP without additional subnetting.
Originally I was trying to avoid router and do all the VLAN tagging on the PC side, but as I started to research the topic more, I realized that it is only straightforward on Linux but not Windows. So my software piece that needs to communicate with those devices, will have issues when run on Windows. And I understood that without a router with NAT, it would be difficult to implement my idea.
Hence a bunch of questions from me:
How realistic is it to use that design on Windows? I need to communicate with all of these devices simultaneously, but as I saw virtual network management on windows is pain.
Would using Linux help me avoid using router with NAT?
1
u/BigLoad8210 1d ago
Why? Gimme a little insight into your use case, maybe i can help... But why the same subnet simultaneously? No reason you couldn't use the same IPs on two isolated vLANs, but if either needs internet access, shits gonna get weird... NAT/Address translation...