So I moved a few months ago, and only just now had time between work and school to set up my smart home again. Which turned out to be a sort-of blessing, since HA did some updates and the one for sensor and binary sensor templates dramatically screwed me as I template a lot. It also gave me the opportunity to upgrade my Yellow’s Pi module, and I found (though haven’t installed) an internal z-wave module for it, which I’ll do when I’m off for Christmas and New Year.

However, since I am starting fresh, I thought I’d ask around on best practices. So I use the Orbi Pro 6 which has three primary and one guest SSID, and I have it behind a Google router in its DMZ because we have Google Fiber here. Which also turned into an advantage because I wanted to a.) do full IoT isolation and also b.) have someplace to put my singleboard computers and my servers that’s safer but still have internet access plus c.) avoid wifi congestion (three VLANs plus the primary router’s wifi takes care of that nicely).

On the Orbi: VLAN1 is primary and where I keep my singleboard computers, my servers, two TVs, X-Box, Switches, and my laptop. VLAN2 is for IoT hubs, cameras, Roomba, etc. VLAN3 is strictly lightbulbs, which sounds ridic but when I did a wifi analysis they really really super really take up a lot of wifi bandwidth, I’ve been slowly replacing with Hue and other zigbee, but it’s in progress. I may move the cameras there as well.

What I need to figure out is the best way to connect everything to Home Assistant. What I was doing was attaching Yellow to VLAN1 by ethernet and VLAN2, VLAN3, and the primary SSID by wifi. On the Orbi router is an mDNS gateway page so I set it to connect my VLANs so they can exchange some data.

But now I have some time to design, and also, I can run multiple instances of HA on one of my servers. I had been doing that anyway to test any chances and test and run Add-ons that I wrote myself, just not a permanent one (again, test instance; I murdered it a lot and spun up a new one when things got weird).

So for anyone who deals with multiple SSIDs or VLANs (or just has an opinion): keep Yellow as is or go with the multiple instances and use Remote Home Assistant (which I used with my test instance and it worked very well) to send entities in the VLANs back to Yellow? Anyone?

  • JelleWho@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    12 hours ago

    We run a different Vlan (and wifi/ssid) for the IOT devices) around 70 or so). What I did is just make an exception rule in the router so HA can acces all Vlan

  • Theoriginalthon@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    20 hours ago

    Can’t you just put ha on a trunk port, then configure the ha os with multiple vlans, that’s how I usually do servers that are available to multiple vlans, make sure each vlan has it’s own /24.

    Make sure each ssid is mapped to only one vlan. And if possible a different channel for each ssid. As multiple ssids share the same channel. I forced all the iot things on to 2.4ghz as most don’t like combined 2.4/5ghz ssids, and 5ghz for everything else.

    • Seperis@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      So I read this like, fourteen hours ago, and I started to reply that no, I can’t; Orbi Pro 6 will only allow a port to carry one VLAN–which you have to assign–unless it’s a Orbi satellite or my Orbi router-turned-AP. Devices won’t. I tested this a lot.

      But. I hadn’t tested my switches, at least since I got these specific ones. Apparently, my Netgear switches also get the full trunk, because they’re all smart managed. So I set up the VLANs in the switches, assigned them to ports, and moved Yellow onto the appropriate port. I also had to turn off mDNS sharing between VLAN1 and VLAN20/VLAN30 very quickly because mDNS nightmare but–yeah, that worked.

      Thank you. I hadn’t even thought about it because it failed (badly) with my other switches, but here we are. Running discovery tests now with the IoT VLAN to see if everything is still reachable and do some fine-tuning.