I have started with Home-assistant using hassio. I wonder what others have done about needing a lot of IP addresses. My primary modem is on Comcast with LAN network address 10.0.0.1 and that allows masks other than 255.255.255.0 and I wonder if others have gone to larger address spaces to accommodate many IoT devices. Any thoughts or experiences welcome.
Thanks, Doug
Depend on what you need really. A subnet 255.255.255.0 (/24) can accomodate up to 254 hosts.
Even if you have more than 254 hosts for your home automation, some may not required IP addressing.
For example, zigbee and zwave components (like Hue gateway, xiaomi gateway) will just need single IP for its gateway.
All my home automation (iOT) devices have their own VLAN, and don’t touch my normal WiFi network.
I bought a nice minicomputer from ali-express ($180) with 4 network ports and installed pfsense on it (really nice system IMO). I use one port for WAN, one for regular LAN, and one for restricted LAN. I put my security cameras and anything else I don’t want to allow external access to on the restricted LAN and then use pfsense to block all traffic on that to/from the WAN. We just moved so I was running all new cat6 everywhere in the house anyway so having two different physical subnets wasn’t that hard to configure.
I do not know about VLAN and I will look into it.
So far, there has been no reply by anyone who has used a mask other than 255.255.255.0. Does anyone use a different mask and expanded IP range?
Probably not, since most households will never use 254 IP addresses. Anyone that has that many devices will probably have separate VLANs/Subnets for devices. How many devices do you expect to have? Seriously, I am a hardcore tech geek and I don’t have anywhere near 254 IPs being used.
It is possible just to use a mask of 255.255.0.0 with 10.0.xx.yy to have a very large (65K) I.P. range.
I now have my router doing DHCP for 10.0.0.x and static addresses for 10.0.1.x and that has worked great for me. My many various static I.P.s can start on fixed blocks reserved for routers, PCs, RPIs, ESPs with plenty of room for expansion as needed. I have multiple buildings on my LAN at this site and the larger than 254 IPs is a comfortable solution for me.
Yes, I am well aware. I have managed networks of 10.0.0.0/8 before.
You could have specified that you had a large network because of multiple buildings and not a typical ‘home’ network. In this case you REALLY should be using VLANs and proper subnetting with firewalls and layer 3 switching.