VLAN on a home network

When I first setup IP cameras over 2 years ago, I purchased a Cisco PoE switch. I didn't need a managed switched, but at the time, it was the only PoE switch I could find without a fan (I probably should have looked harder). The switch has so many options like locking down ports based on MAC address, VLAN tagging, even some routing capabilities.

I thought about setting up a VLAN to isolate the camera traffic so that only the server recording the video could access the cameras, but decided against it as I couldn't quite figure out all the pieces and didn't see the point in doing so.

After purchasing the EdgeRouter Lite, I had to setup a VLAN for my guest network in order to prevent guest users from having access to the rest of my network. I don't have too many guests over, but I figured it was a good idea and in order to emulate my Time Capsule, I set it up.

Over the past few weeks, I've been testing out an enterprise grade WiFi access point (more on this in a future post) and one of the features it has is the ability to assign a VLAN to a wireless network. Since I already had experience setting up a VLAN, I started playing with this feature and thought about using a VLAN for my WLAN traffic. Why would I do this? That's a really good question. As this is my home network, I wanted the wireless clients to be able to access resources on the wired network and vice versa. A VLAN is designed to isolate traffic and by trying to combine the networks, I was basically defeating a main reason to use a VLAN. However, I went ahead with my experimentation and was able to put wireless clients on a VLAN. The setup was easy and my clients connected. However, I couldn't use auto discovery like mDNS and UPnP that many services use on a home network.

mDNS was solved using:

configure
set service mdns reflector
commit
save
exit

and this post got UPnP discovery working. I did have some high CPU load on my router with this however.

I got everything working and was fairly pleased (except for the high CPU usage on the router). A Ubiquiti employee pointed out the obvious to me that doing what I wanted defeated the purpose of a VLAN, so I really started thinking about what I was trying to do. I love statistics, so I guess I really just want to know how much traffic is going over the wireless network.

The other reason for doing VLANs is to handle more than 254 (or so) devices on a network. My home network currently has 38 devices, so I haven't hit this limit, yet. If I was running a small business, I'm sure that I could hit this limit fairly quickly and VLANs would make a lot of sense. In that case, the mDNS reflector and UPnP broadcasting could bog down the router. In addition, in order to route traffic to a VLAN, the traffic has to go through a router and that will increase load on the router.

So, I've learned a bit about VLANs, UPnP, and mDNS. I haven't accomplished anything in this experiment as my network still works the same way as it did before I started this.