I have all of my hubs (and hue hub) on a POE switch. I have generally been trying to educate myself on some networking basics. Are all of my devices connected to that switch essentially a VLAN? If I were to add another switch, would devices connected to that be on a second?
My thought process (not that I actually intend to do this, just want to know). If I wanted to isolate my Home Automation equipment so that someone on my Wi-Fi couldn't somehow how access it, does placing it on a switch accomplish this? it seems like creating VLANS maybe a way to do that. Am I putting these pieces together correctly? or am I way, way off base?
Thanks!
EDIT: Oh! Are there any books or resources any one can recommend? I'm looking at books on Amazon, but how do I know which ones are good and which ones are written by crackpots??
That the switch provides POE doesn't change anything, so let's just say you have devices connected to a switch.
A switch can be thought of as a multiple plug adapter. It uses one outlet slot to provide multiple outlet slots. A network switch doesn't care what passes through it .. it just passes the traffic along without any smarts to it.
A device which may function as a switch but has smarts to route particular traffic to different places, to create VLANs, and to do other smart functionality is a router.
This switch does have that ability, as does my router. I had read something that was leading me to believe the switch itself was providing that function already as well. As i said, still diving in and trying to understand all of this. I can see where it may be beneficial to separate my HA stuff from everything else on the network.
It is typically possible to use settings to create VLANs or it's possible to physically separate networks if there is not a need for home automation devices to talk to anything on main network or vice versa.
No a vlan is simply a virtual segment on your local lan. Nothing to do with the cloud. Then you simply set up rules for traffic to and from those segments
I'm not familiar with that brand. When I first setup my network, I used Unifi Edgerouter X and Unifi switches and AP. One port of Edgerouter X was the 192.168.1.1 network and other was 192.168.1.2 network. I plugged separate switches into each then all IoT devices connected to the .2 network. However, my computer was not able to connect to IoT devices so I went with VLAN method and only use one port of router. None of it has to do with the cloud. I don't know enough to know if you can do VLANs at a switch. Something has to be acting as a DHCP to assign IP addresses.
OK, I was trying to paint the general picture of the difference. Capabilities that work at layer 2 of the OSI model could be included and still be defined as a switch.
