I don't know much about VLAN's, but I'm looking to extend my IoT network to my dumb access point (configured using this tutorial). As per that tutorial, I've already extended my primary network to it and that's working well.
I have a number of Wi-Fi IoT devices (camera's) that are using the IoT network on the primary router, but they are quite far from that router and the connection is poor, so I want to extend it, so they can connect via the dumb access point.
Trouble is, I can't find a solid answer to the question I have. I'm following this tutorial and like all, it talks about doing this with VLAN's (feel free to point me in the direction of an "official" OpenWRT tutorial for this, if there is one)?
My main concern is that all but 1 of my 4 LAN ports are occupied by ethernet connections to other devices. With this being the case can I setup VLAN's on those ports or not - would the connected devices lose their connection?
I've included a diagram of my network setup below.
VLANs will allow you to do this in general, but it is important that there is only a single network on any unmanaged switch. That is to say, you have 2 unmanaged switches in your diagram -- they cannot carry VLANs.
Your dumb AP and your primary router, provided that they are both running OpenWrt or another firmware that is VLAN aware, can be configured to carry VLANs.
What brand+models are your primary router and dumb AP? What firmware is each running?
Also, it is not clear what devices or ports need to be on the different VLANs -- so specifically, you show your router and dumb AP connected by an ethernet cable... that can certainly carry VLANs from one device to the other. However, the connections to the unmanaged switches cannot be used for VLANs. Are the devices in question only wireless? If so, both the primary router and the dumb AP can certainly have VLANs and multiple SSIDs (provided the wifi hardware is capable) and you will have a single guest network distributed across two APs.
That makes sense, and would indeed be the case for the switches.
My Primary Router is a Netgear R7800 and the access point is a Netgear WAC104, both are running OpenWRT 22.03.5.
Devices connecting via the switches will only ever be on my LAN (the main network), and IoT/Guest devices are only ever going to be connected over Wi-Fi to the AP and/or Router directly.
You should consider upgrading to 23.05.2 (latest as of right now). But otherwise, yes, no problem to do what you want. It's actually fairly simple and we can guide you through it.
@psherman Although both devices are running 22.03.5 I've noticed that my AP (Netgear WAC104) is using DSA, but my router (Netgear R7800) isn't.
Would you recommend I upgrade the R7800 to one of the latest snapshots (which apparently are using DSA) - as it seems like 23.05.2 doesn't use it yet?
I get the feeling that it would be better to try and accomplish this whole thing using DSA if that's where OpenWRT is moving to rather than try and figure it all out when the R7800 moves over to using DSA and then not having a clue what I'm doing.
That being said, there doesn't appear to be much in the way of guides/tutorials for extending networks to dumb AP's using DSA VLAN's so looks like I have a lot of research and learning to do.
snapshots have switched to DSA, keeping both consistent on DSA will make it slightly easier for you - but 23.05.x and swconfig are also fully functional, the decision is yours (personally I am using snapshots on ipq806x (and everything else)).
