Can anyone give me some guidance on what ip address range i should implement for a small business. They have about 20 devices plus ip phone system. They current are using 192.168.1.* which works fine but i want to deploy a pfsense firewall, and i want to setup a vpn for remote work. I want to make sure there is no problems with vpn collision with ip range from home users. I’m a novice so i haven’t had a need for alternative ip range till now. cheers
There’s three prefixes that you can use for private addresses. It’s entirely up to you how your want to implement. Try to avoid common ranges like 192.168.0.0/24 and 192.168.1.0/24, this will likely cover 90% of all of your users connecting via a VPN.
10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255 (10/8 prefix)
172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255 (172.16/12 prefix)
192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255 (192.168/16 prefix)
I personally switched my network to using 172.16/12 prefixes as I find they’re less common and my employer makes heavy use of 10/8 prefixes.
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Thanks Davie, much appreciated
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I know you already got it sorted, but I too would suggest 172.16.x.x range. That way you can still identify things nicely by doing stuff like using 172.16.0.x for all network hardware, 172.16.1.x for all computers, 172.16.2.x for all printers in the office, 172.16.3.x for all voip phones, 172.16.4.x for all ip security cameras and the like. They are not on different subnets specifically when you use a /16 (aka 255.255.0.0) which can make less experienced networking people have an easier time and require a less sophisticated (eg. basic consumer grade) router. You can still set up VLANs with them to segregate traffic if you wanted to of course, but simply being able to still identify classes of devices by the starting IP address even when you want them all on the same subnet and talking to each other without setting up traffic rules is really handy.
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For a small business with around 20 devices and an IP phone system, a common IP address range to use is the 10.0.0.0/8 range. This will give you plenty of IP addresses to work with and will prevent any potential conflicts with home users. You can also use the 172.16.0.0/12 range, which is also commonly used for small businesses.
when they say the range, they don’t mean 10.0.0.0/8, but a /24 network within that range. ie
10.5.6.0/24
router = 10.5.6.1
last ip address assignable to a device = 10.5.6.254
if you were setting up a dhcp server, you would probably set a range of 10.5.6.50 to 10.5.6.250
addresses from 10.5.6.2 to 10.5.6.49 would be reserved for non-dhcp IP addresses, ie servers and printers. You may have the VPN server assign IPs of 10.5.6.40 to 10.5.6.49 to clients who login to access network resources.
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