Day 43 of starting projects and most likely not completing them. Yet.
Linux is on hold. So I’m trying to dive into other projects until I can come back to that. I have some cheap chinese PoE cameras that I want to set up. I’m trying to do everything pretty bare bones, as its cheaper but I’m also trying to not use anything new. Theres a ton of stuff on Facebook Marketplace and the like that I’d rather use first.
With my Router, Its a relative bare bones pc. I have a 2x2.5gb NIC, from which I have my LAN and WAN ports connected. My motherboard Ethernet Port is unused.
What I was considering doing to start with, just because this feels like the easier start up, is to create a VLAN specifically for the parent interface em0. Set up VLAN rules so that there can be no outbound traffic to the WAN net. And then use this port as a single port to plug in my PoE Camera to.
Now I do have a PoE injector between the camera and the router. When I plug in the Ethernet into the motherboard ethernet port, it just flashes amber which usually indicates nothing is happening. I try to do an IP search and it shows the Camera is not connected.
If I instead connect the ethernet cable to my Access Point, it instantly gets recognised. It shows up connected with the IP Search. I unplug it straight away as I know itll be phoning home once I confirm it is showing up using the IP Search.
Does anyone know why its not showing when I connect it straight into the motherboard? Ive tried googling and searching L1T but cant find anything. Chat GPT wasnt showing anything for me either.
The fact its showing when connected to the AP shows that everything is actually functional, but it just doesnt work when connected to the motherboard port?
Im thinking that I might have to learn how to do VLAN’s maybe for the cameras IP address? or mac address might be safer? instead of trying it this way.
Exactly.
Or, since software bridge has very low performance and raises your power consumption you could also get a cheap poe+ switch and connect that to your existing switch. Though since right now you only have a single camera, a software bridge after making a new LAN interface is probably fine.
So the issue I was having is that I am trying to assign a VLAN to a specific port on my Network Switch. However I think it is an unmanaged switch? From everything I read, I can’t sit there and assign the VLAN since it is unmanaged.
So my workaround for the time being was to just use a single camera on the LAN port on my motherboard, just to be connected and learn the ins and outs to start with. Think thats going to be more work than not because the Transparent Filtering Bridge was causing me non stop headaches trying to get that implemented.
I think the easiest thing to do will be to buy another Switch, one that is managed. So I can assign a port on that to a VLAN. Assign rules to the VLAN so no traffic leaving that port can leave the home network (thanks cheap chinese cameras). I can connect my unmanaged Switch to that to then connect my cameras. I have a seperate PoE 4 port injector which is why I was thinking this way.
Think that should work from what I was reading.
I’m also thinking of connecting a second old router to this unmanaged switch, so I can connect things to this Wifi that doesn’t need Internet Access. Aka most things. I think that should still run through the VLAN and not be able to access the internet. I haven’t looked into this but I’m expecting thats how it should work.
