I have three VLANs on my home network. VLAN10 (Primary), VLAN20 (IoT) & VLAN30 (Guest). Primary is where my personal laptop and work-from-home laptop connect. You can pretty easily guess what the other two are for.
I’m trying to wrap my head around how mDNS might be helpful here. But one of the videos I watched in trying to learn about it gave an example of where the person thought it would be useful:
Imagine that you have an Apple TV. Your guest can see it sitting there. But he can’t see it on the network because it’s in a separate VLAN. mDNS will fix that for you.
Doesn’t that negate the whole purpose of setting up VLANs?
One last thought: I typically only have two devices on the Primary network (both are laptops). So there shouldn’t be a lot of traffic coming from the primary network.
It doesn’t negate the purpose of VLANs; it sort of makes them able to fulfill more tasks. For example, I have a media VLAN where all of my media servers and devices live. I don’t need any of those to make connections to anything else on my network, but u do want devices from some subnets to be able to access them in certain ways. I use avahi and some firewall rules to all certain communication from my user VLANs to the media VLAN and that lets me do things like use AirPlay or Chromecast. On small networks, it can be quite useful, but mDNS is also super chatty and you can have airtime issues on very large WiFi networks.
Ok. Thanks that helps. I installed the package but didn’t enable anything yet. I was looking through the settings and trying to understand all this first.
I don’t want any devices on the IoT network to have access to any other network. Same goes for the Guest network. But I do want devices on the Primary network to be able to access devices on the IoT network.
That being said, the settings within Avahi wanted to know which networks to “listen and send on”. It sounds like just IoT. Or do I need to include Primary in that?
The only IoT devices that I need to access from the Primary network would be my Home Assistant server and my WiFi printer – all the other devices on that network talk directly to Home Assistant. And HA tells them what to do. I connect to HA and tell it what I want it to have them do.
And I also have a Wireguard VPN set up for remote access. Do I need to have it listen on that interface as well? I do connect to it that way too.