This. Thank you very much, that was absolutely the succinct answer I was after and despite my desperate hopes otherwise (i.e. as title, ‘forcing’ a Static IP or enabling some sort of option in the ESP32 firmware) to make it VLAN-aware, I suspected your two options was the ultimate requirement.
The first option you mention is …expensive and ugly but doable (and I wish there were some really small, cheap 2-port managed switches around, I am sure there is a market for them).
The second option is not physically possible, a big managed switch I can do, but extra cabling, nope, the walls are reinforced concrete, the duct takes 1 cable only.
I probably went off on a tangent at the outset by not mentioning I had thought briefly about theses two options (although you have clarified them way more elegantly yhan I could have) but I guess I was hoping-against-hope for a sneaky ESP32 dirty-fix. It is not to be; and that’s OK. Thank you again.
OK, fair comment neel-m. I thought I had clarified my reasoning along the way and certainly there were a couple of folks who simply said “cannot, you need to do this”, but I appreciate I have, as Yoda famously said, “much to learn” (about networking in general and VLANs in particular).
Thank you though for your patience. I still think it was a healthy discussion .
The discussion has been great. I took have heard many people extolling the virtues of VLANs and am in the process of considering it. I have a Unifi setup so it should be easy. But it still involves touching every device and I have heard there are some issues with mDNS across VLANs. I remember the days of static IP addresses and complicated network configuration from the very earliest days of the internet (when only very large companies, academic institutions, and DARPA has access). Things have gotten both more complicated and also easier, since then. I usually like it to be easy, sometimes it takes a lot of work to make it appear that way.
Regarding ESP32s I went from wireless to wired for reliability, the irony now being that wireless goes straight to a VLAN by virtue of the SSID whereas you have to jump through various VLAN Tagging/PVID configuration hoops for wired versions, depending of course on your router and switch setup.
Most of my Mesh Node or Ethernet locations (with PoE incidentally) will only have the Node and/or the ESP32-S3-Eth-PoE in a nice small unobtrusive housing that I can stick to the wall at the jack or put under the bed.
So what I’d love to see is one of the current (or more advanced Px?) ESP32s to include a small single-board integrated Switch with PVIDs, now that would be perfect. Does such an animal exist already? I can’t find an example.
I don’t really need a multi-port managed switch at all node/Ethernet /jack locations (certainly not just for this purpose) and note that my (ASUS) Router/Mesh system doesn’t propagate VLANs to the Nodes Ethernet Ports, so I would need switches. If such an animal were to exist I could dispense with multiport powered Switches or the notion of VLAN capable Nodes. Anyone know of any developments in this area? Thanks .
VLAN capable nodes sort of goes against the idea with VLANs, which is to separate the VLANs from each other on a network level, so the host would never know the difference.
If you start by moving that capability to the end devices, then you might as well skip VLAN and just use multiple subnets on the same physical network infrastructure.
Hmm OK, you’re probably right on a technical level in terms of the whole reason for VLANs, but hopefully you can see my wishful thinking for a 1 device plug-in solution here.
I am not sure if this fellow was on the same track?, but can’t see anything came out of it.
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