Massively OT: Any network engineers here?

[NormandieStill]

There are obviously more specialist forums around but before subscribing to and integrating another forum I thought I'd try my luck here. Warning, potential gibberish for non geeks follows.

Our basic network at home is simple. A router from the ISP provides Ethernet ports and wifi. And until relatively recently this worked fine. But I've been steadily adding IoT devices turning our house if not smart, at least a little less stupid. And to save a lot of grief and development time, they're all wifi based (mostly ESP32s). Which means that we seem to have bumped into an undocumented limit on the number of wifi devices our ISP router supports.

To solve this I have broken out my old WRT54GL router and configured a new network. The idea is that the box running HomeAssistant and all of the gadgets live on their own subnet with their own wifi link and are thus isolated from the rest of the house. Which is relatively simple except that I want to be able to access the HomeAssistant box from both the other subnet and from the internet.

Internet access is currently working through a NAT rule on the ISP's router but the interface is fairly simplistic and I can't seem to define static routes from there. My thought was to use the second router to expose a port in the same way as the ISP's router does and try and map to that but it's been a while (decades) since I did any serious network engineering and I'm not sure if there isn't a better plan, or just better words to describe this one.

Thoughts?

[quadra]

A managed switch?

[jonnys_spirit]

I use a HW wired router that has the ability to create vlans/subnets and managed switches which are vlan aware as well as wireless access points that don’t provide routing or dhcp functions and run in “bridged mode”.

The number of devices or IPs available on a /24 subnet is 256 with one IP used for the router/gateway and another as the “broadcast” IP for that subnet so 254 usable device IPs available. Those IPs may be assigned statically or dynamically by the router if it’s running a dhcp service.

I think it’s probably unlikely that you have more than 254 devices/IPs on your home network including IoT devices but maybe you do.

You probably have the ability with the ISP supplied router to adjust the range of IPs that the dhcp service has allocated? If not, you could replace the ISP router with a dedicated router that allows you to adjust the dhcp pool range of IPs.

It’s a worthwhile effort to diagram your network needs and implementation with devices, IPs, wired and wireless connectivity, and any static/dhcp IPs that you may need to consider whether additional subnets are useful.

A dedicated IoT subnet is not uncommon but it does increase the complexity if you enjoy that kind of thing and dedicated “routers” generally perform multiple functions like modem, routing, dhcp services, subnets & vlans, and firewall services. Dedicated boxes can also provide those services.

DDWRT is an open source firmware that can run on many consumer “routers” which can also cover that range of deeper functionality in one box. If you daisy chain a second router behind your ISP router you might want to run the ISP router in bridge mode so you don’t run into double NAT issues.

Hope that helps

Cheers,
jonny

[NormandieStill]

Thanks. In the last few minutes I successfully got it set up. So I now have two routers. The ISP's one which manages our "normal" internet usage (192.168.1.x), and the OpenWRT-running WRT54GL which manages the IoT family (192.168.2.x). The WRT appears as a device on our normal network and the magic of port forwarding lets me access the Home Assistant device via that router from both our normal network and the internet. IoT devices can still see the internet, but are not visible to normal users. And (hopefully, yet to be fully tested), the freed up "slots" on the ISP's router should allow us to finally resolve some of the connection issues we've been having.

And reading this, it occurs to me that I really need to start documenting our house. If I were to shuffle off this mortal coil, my better (and considerably less geeky) half would find herself living in a smart and probably not-very-responsive house!

[jonnys_spirit]

Congratulations on getting it set up Normandie.

I'll just comment that I'm the kind of person that "fixes things" and when we invariably go down the rabbit hole we sometimes fix it so nobody can fix it... Breaking the internet (aka wifi) is the cardinal sin in our house too so I try to minimize changes and schedule them for low activity windows where I can test and back out if/when needed..

Cheers,
jonny

[Big River]

Another thing to consider, my router broadcasts 5 and 2 ghz ranges, some things run better on 2ghz. I put my printers on 2 ghz cameras on 5 ghz, plus your phones, etc for your setup. The mapping devices is good advice.

[NormandieStill]

I'll just comment that I'm the kind of person that "fixes things" and when we invariably go down the rabbit hole we sometimes fix it so nobody can fix it...

Hey. I resemble that remark!

Breaking the internet (aka wifi) is the cardinal sin in our house too so I try to minimize changes and schedule them for low activity windows where I can test and back out if/when needed..

Same problem here. This is in fact the reason for the change in setup. Breaking the old setup was a progressive thing. I've been adding "gadgets" for a couple of years now, and seem to have finally hit the breaking point. As is often the case, finding the time to set this up was difficult, until it became a necessity.

On the bright side, I have an ethernet run out to the shed where I do my distilling, meaning that when I finally build a fermentation chamber, I can tie the iSpindel to the same network and access the data via Home Assistant.

Another thing to consider, my router broadcasts 5 and 2 ghz ranges, some things run better on 2ghz. I put my printers on 2 ghz cameras on 5 ghz, plus your phones, etc for your setup. The mapping devices is good advice.

Same here. I had to split the two ranges out into different ESSIDs because one of my IoT devices wouldn't play nicely with the same ESSID being available at 2 different frequencies. Now I can put it back as it was, which seemed to work much better.

[bilgriss]

I've never had much luck in the past with the "built in" wireless routers provided by ISP's. They always seem to drop connections and react a lot to noise from any neighbors or devices on similar channels. For some time, I just turn that stuff off, and use a Ubiquity Unifi access point, which has a fairly nice controller setup you manage from your computer rather than a little oversimplified built in web service. I've been happy with the stability. It has the ability to do multiple vlans or SSID's but I've never felt I needed to mess with it at home. Way too much of that stuff at work.

The OpenWRT stuff is nice if you have a decent router that's fully supported. Really improves the performance of some as well.

[Dougmatt]

I use a mesh network at home. Use the ISP’s router as the gateway NAT device and let my euro mesh handle everything else (dhcp and a few static IP’s I have). Dramatically improved everything by extending the transmitters closer to the end points. TV streaming in particular improved in bedrooms that were pretty far from the isp router. I had a dead area in the basement that I opened up by adding a mesh point.

I have a lot of devices, but haven’t had to implement a second subnet…. I can see a day, but that is not today,,,,

[SouthwestAl]

Documentation. Documentation. Documentation.

I setup my network in 2017/2018 with multiple VLANS and subnets for guest use, home users, admin users, IoT, cameras etc etc. While it has undergone a few changes over the years, having it documented in a network diagram and keeping copies of config & backup files has really helped when the inevitable happens. As my place comprises of quite a few outbuildings connected with underground fibre, a Google Earth map showing where the feeds go (along with electric and water) has also come in handy, as it's depressing how much we tend to forget as we age (not the fault of the alcohol, obviously!)