Network routing question

Yeah kinda. Still seems like a lot of traffic for a wifi network. I don't like wifi cameras, though admittedly I have Arlos stuck all over the place. When I get the energy I will toss them all and go with wired PoE cameras.

I am a bit late to the party but this is quite easy to setup. I do it all the time.

My home/business network has seven isolated subnets (or LAN's if you prefer). My HE is on a subnet isolated and dedicated to devices that I do not have root privileges on, such as Roku, Google Chrome, TV's, Printers, IP phones and so on. It makes for complex routing and firewall rules but I need this level of network security.

For this reason I prefer IOT devices that have physical Ethernet ports as its easier to isolate them. However, I do need to point out this type of setup has some pitfalls. For example Chrome devices need to be on the same subnet as the Cell trying to find and cast to the TV or Chrome device. So if they are not on the same subnet you need to create firewall rules that allow just the cellphone to contact the Chrome device on the other WiFi subnet and so on.

So any computer with two Ethernet ports can function as a router. You just need to setup the routes and gateways and the traffic will flow (the computer with the two LAN connection becomes the gateway for the route between the LAN's). However, you do need to keep in mind how you will do DHCP and DNS if you do that locally. You can do one DHCP server on each LAN and most consumer routers have that built in, or you can have a single DHCP server that handles them all. You will just need to setup DHCP pass though on your routers if its supported (most do). My four Linksys WiFi routers are setup in DHCP pass though mode so that a cell phone can roam between access points seamlessly. If yours don't you can probably flash them with tomato router and that does support pass though.

If you are serious about this type of setup, my recommendation would be to use a open source firewall router such as PFSense or IPFire rather then try to setup complex routing with multiple subnets in IP tables. You will need an old PC and a good Intel mutiport NIC card. A cheap NIC like Realtech does not support hardware offloading and will use up CPU cycles, an Intel card card can route entire enterprise level networks with barely 10-20% CPU load. Just watch the NAT'ing as that does need CPU time. Let me know if you need any help.

Actually that is not accurate. While it is not always simple, it is absolutely possible.

If you have two separate LAN's and you want to route traffic between the two you just need a router between the two LAN's and a properly configured route. Some consumer grade routers do support this if you know how to set it up properly and can disable layer II forwarding when dealing with multiple DHCP servers. Flashing with tomato DD-WRT or other open source firmware will usually give access to these features in consumer grade routers if they are not available in the stock firmware.

For a single controlling DHCP server you would want layer II forwarding turned on, or have the router in DHCP pass through mode (most consumer routers do support this mode). The gotcha would be that the DHCP server needs to know that the route to LAN2 needs to be assigned a separate IP range from LAN1. A PC setup with multiple Ethernet ports one to each LAN can suffice nicely in this regard and can easily function as the DHCP server for both, or just act as an enterprise class router.

Essentially any computer with multiple NIC's can be turned into a enterprise class router with the correct configuration. I should clarify..... any Linux based computer. It used to be possible way back with Windows NT, but I have no idea about Windows 10.