I’m basically a networking noob looking for resources to learn some missed fundamentals. Not sure exactly what to search for…
I simply want to create a few independent networks in my home for things like media, secured browsing, and a “Homelab” kinda thing(I installed proxmox and want to explore VM and Linux stuff. For now I just want to figure out best practices for doing this.
I did create a static connection from my ISP modem/router(192.168.1.2) to another router that serves my media(tv, consoles, and home wifi)(192.168.50.1) and that seems to work… but I feel that it is not best practice to just use a static IP to each new router for each network… or is it that easy. Or what hardware/software should i use manage the IP addresses for each network.
I found some Network Chuck videos on subnetting and I understand what is going on and how the addresses work but I’m not going to need more that 250 hosts on each network so I shouldn’t really need to subnet anything.
Thank you in advance for reading this and replying. I don’t want to take up too much of anyone’s time on the specifics I will take suggestions for videos, websites or even keywords to search for.
To do this, generally what you would end up setting up is different subnets within your router so that you have a separate subnet for each intended network type. This is separate from the amount of hosts each subnet can support - this only matters so long as you have enough room for the hosts in that subnet and don’t run out; for most home users this isn’t an issue. In most home router/firewall all-in-ones I’ve used, the subnets are also used to help define firewall rules which define that security boundary between the networks, and also for defining rules between those networks and the internet.
As an example, using your categories ( /24 is subnet mask 255.255.255.0’s shorthand form; this gives 1-254 as usable host IPs in that network):
Past those, depending on your router model, a quick look for ‘<brand / router> setup best practices’ or ‘<brand / router> secure IoT setup’ is likely to find something to help you along. Especially if it’s one of the enthusiast things like (in no particular order, and non-exhaustive list) pfsense, openwrt, ubiquiti unifi, or tplink’s omada.
They say internet is a network of networks, so let’s try thinking about all this stuff from the bottom up…
If networks were fully separate, as in nothing from your home network will ever talk to anything in your homelab network, and if you never ever have any device or router, sitting in both… then you can absolutely use the same IP range and prefix for both networks.
… on the other hand, if you have a router or a device connected to both, this device needs to know where to send a packet, and a canonical way of differentiating where a packet should go, is by matching a destination address to a route prefix.
Where does the term “subnetting” come in.
Imaginary use case. IBM used to have 9.0.0.0/8 all to themselves, 16.7M addresses. They were deciding how to split that across various organizations consisting of various other smaller organizations and consisting of various other organizations… or you can imagine IBM used to have staff all around the world, 9.1/16 was US, 9.44/16 was UK, 9.33/16 was France. In France they had 3 floors in their building in Paris, one for “sales”, for “accounting”, for “engineering”, so they had 9.33.1/24 , 9.33.2/24, 9.33.3/24 …
… but from a perspective of the router in UK anything starting with 9.33/16 is a network in France, and anything within France is less important and a “sub” network, and the UK router only needs 1 route to France.
… this is all in theory and imaginary.
In my vocabulary a “subnet” is just a synonym for “network”, and non overlapping prefixes make things easier.