top | item 45841084

(no title)

>We really should be yelling for advancements in simple-to-configure dedicated, restricted VLANs and SSIDs for IOT devices instead of yelling about how inappropriate we think that using IP is.

What is the lay of the land for typical consumers in this respect? Any products you've worked with or would recommend?

I've recently started with Home Assistant and have been adding devices to my single network. The ISP provided eero modem/router doesn't provide VLAN capability.

discuss

ssl-3|3 months ago

I don't use consumer off-the-shelf routers enough (these days) to know the lay of the land very well. But when I do get my hands on them (usually when a friend wants help with something), I do have a look through the config options just to see what functions they expose. And I don't see that kind of thing available in the configs of the stuff I've recently had my hands on.

In my own little world at home, I just use OpenWRT (on a now-old Raspberry Pi 4), Mikrotik access points, and with some random switches that grok 802.11q wherever they are useful. This has let me do whatever I've imagined wanting so far with VLANs, SSIDs, routing, firewalling, ...

And a person can also use a one-box solution running OpenWRT (the OpenWRT One is such a box) or Mikrotik's RouterOS (like their succinctly-named L009UiGS-2HaxD-IN).

But all of that is drifting pretty far from the concept I'd like to see, which is:

Person walks into Wal-Mart. Person buys a router, and some Matter wifi light bulbs. As a part of setting them up, they're walked through a simple process of making an isolated network for those light bulbs.

And we don't seem to be anywhere near there yet.

(And that may seem like a far-reaching goal to some, but similar things have been accomplished in the past. A router from Wal-Mart used to boot up out of the box and Just Work -- while providing a completely unfettered, unencrypted networked named "linksys" or "NETGEAR" for anyone within earshot to participate in.

Things are longer that way these days. Consumer routers have tended to provide secure-by-default wireless networks for a rather long time now. At least in that one little, important aspect of consumer goods, sanity did eventually prevail.)