[mythtv-users] VLANs, HDHomeruns and bears, oh my

[Stephen Worthington]

On Mon, 6 Apr 2020 19:51:51 +0100, you wrote:

>..talking of Edgreouter, could you use an Edgerouter X (~£50) and set that
>up to have separate networks with the Edgerouter routing appropriately
>between them and making use of its Firewall? It has 5 ports which can each
>be on their own LAN with the firewall set up between them. There is a bit
>of a learning curve, but you can start off with the GUI.
>
>https://community.ui.com/questions/How-to-separate-LANs-in-GUI/652bdd69-fe9b-47c4-9537-5d7ccffd8738
>
>(and, not that I'm an expert, I thought Stephen's VLAN explanation was
>great - and they are worth investigating too)

Yes, an EdgeRouter X can do this.  But it really does not have enough
ports to run a network by itself.  If you create the VLANs on the ERX
ports, then if you want more than one device on each VLAN, you have to
have a switch on each of the ERX switch ports to accommodate the other
devices.  So you then have to have multiple small switches, or use one
bigger VLAN capable switch.  But multiple switches is a pain, as you
always run out of ports on one of them and have to have room to set
them up where the cables run to.  So a bigger VLAN capable switch
works much better.  But then you have a VLAN capable switch that can
set up the VLANs itself and have no need to use the switch ports on
the ERX for that.  And also you run into the problem of bridging in a
small router.  If you want two of the non-switch ports on the ERX to
both be on the same VLAN, you have to bridge the VLAN between those
ports.  Which you can do, but doing it causes the ERX to no longer be
able to offload the processing of packets to its offload hardware, so
the speed drops down to miserable levels.  If your Internet
connections is below about 60 Mbit/s and you do not want high speed
between your VLANs, that would still be OK, but it is not really a
good idea.  So you are back to wanting a proper large VLAN capable
switch.

If the VLANs are only going to WiFi from the ERX, that is the
situation where it does have enough ports for the job.  But if your
WiFi access point/router only has one Ethernet port that can be used
as a WAN port, the ERX has too many ports then.  In my case, my WiFi
router (Linksys WRT1900ac) is now running OpenWRT and I have it set up
to use two WAN ports, so that each VLAN on WiFi gets a full 1 Gbit/s
to my main router.

So overall the extra switch ports on the ERX are not as useful as they
may seem, unless you have a very small network.  And the ERX is a very
small router which is running out of room - when you update its
firmware, you have to delete the old version before you can store the
new one, so you have no fallback version to switch to if something
goes wrong.

I recommend getting a proper VLAN capable switch, and using an
ERLite-3 or ER4 router with it.  Or an equivalent Mikrotik.  I started
with a ERLite-3 and have recently changed to an ER4 as it handles my
large number of connections better - I get significantly faster
torrents.  If you do not do torrents, an ERLite-3 is fine and
significantly cheaper.  For my switch I am using an EdgeSwitch 24 Lite
(no POE), which has all the business class features you would ever
want.  There are now apparently cheaper switches that should be just
as good from other manufacturers, but I do not regret getting the ES24
at all - it is a joy to use since they changed it to using their new
GUI.  I love being able to see the traffic speeds on each port, and
put names on the ports so I do not have to keep a list of what each
port is connected to or put labels on the cables.