vLANs - do they need a particular type of router ?

Donnie Fisher · 7 Jul 2020 at 15:35

I'm in the process of updating the CCTV we have and moving it to an IP camera based setup which will run off an old server machine which has 2 NIC ports.

My network around the house is made up of a combination of 3 netgear smart switches, a couple of which have POE to drive the WAP points, which were also put in place to drive future CCTV cameras, which I'm now at that stage. My internet comes from a BT Home hub, feeding one of the switches.

When reading up about CCTV, there is strong advice to put the cameras on their own VLAN. As I understand it, I should be able to manage adapting the switches to have VLAN enabled ports, and trunking ports between them etc ...

but for the whole system to work, does my BT Home Hub modem / router have to be changed to something that is VLAN aware ?

the-evaluator · 7 Jul 2020 at 17:45

You'll need either a layer 3 switch or router to route between the VLANs. The BT Home Hub won't do it, it's possible the Netgear switches might but it's unlikely as there's generally a fair price hike when you go for a layer 3 switch over a layer 2. So you'd need a new router and possibly new switches too depending on how things are physically connected.

To be honest, for home usage it's not worth worrying about.

gpuerrilla · 7 Jul 2020 at 22:17

Is this for you to connect over the internet?

From what I see the people doing this type of thing try to segment the cameras from the regular devices. Could it not be achieved by using a different subnet?

Donnie Fisher · 7 Jul 2020 at 23:31

It's not really to connect from the internet. It's more to ensure that cameras can't see the internet and phone home type thing.

Quartz · 8 Jul 2020 at 08:41

Donnie Fisher said:
It's not really to connect from the internet. It's more to ensure that cameras can't see the internet and phone home type thing.

Then put them on a physically separate LAN.

gpuerrilla · 8 Jul 2020 at 09:08

Yeah so you either subnet them off where you could control no internet for them doing it a logical way, or as @Quartz said just place them on a contained LAN on their own.

K.C. Leblanc · 8 Jul 2020 at 12:44

Another way round this would be to set their ip addresses manually but leave their default gateway blank.