VLAN joys (by alaric)
Well, having eliminated the VLANs from my network problems, I've been busily taking advantage of them again, and working around the fact that daapd and samba don't seem to talk very well to iTunes and MacOS X's smbfs.
Firstly, I set up netatalk and, after giving up trying to configure AppleTalk, just went for afp-over-tcp, and now Sarah's laptop can mount the domestic fileserver and achieve the kinds of speeds I'd expect for a 54Mbps shared wireless LAN. Then I set her iTunes to not copy files to her own iTunes folder, and then told it to index all of the music on the server, so she can play music directly over AppleTalk. Not quite as convenient as DAAP (iTunes bitches if she's out of range of the wireless LAN, for a start...), but at least it works.
Then I proceeded to switch the home server back to connecting via a single 802.1Q trunk, meaning it can join as many vlans as it needs to and only uses up a single switch port; and what I did this morning was to move the main router.
Now, as I've mentioned before, this router was originally installed in our airing cupboard; a point that was conveniently the length of my longest UTP cable from where the phone lines come in and the ADSL router sits in one direction, and the length of my longest UTP cable from the office switch in the other direction, which happened to have a power outlet. But I've always been uneasy about putting a nice piece of equipment in a hot cupboard, under a large tank full of water.
Then I got a Wifi AP, and plugged it into the router's third port, and also placed it in the airing cupboard.
Then with the advent of the vlan switches, I put a switch in there too, and had three short patch cables running from the three router ports to three switch ports, one set up on each vlan, as a quick migration, and plugged the AP into an extra switch port on the wifi vlan.
But now I've been moving things out of the cupboard. For a start, I moved the wifi AP to the top of the freezer, using a longer cable up to the switch in the airing cupboard. Then this morning I moved the router to the office, and configured it to have a vlan trunk on just one of its interfaces. Since the vlans mean any network socket can be on any vlan, or indeed on any combination of them with a trunk, this means the router can still connect to all three vlans to route between them, and no longer needs to be in an awkward location.
Yay!
Now the only thing in the airing cupboard is the switch - with a single cable going to the office switch, then the long cable to the ADSL router downstairs and a medium-length cable to the wireless AP downstairs. I'm wondering if there's enough slack in the office cable to let me move the switch to the top of the freezer as well, thus clearing the airing cupboard of nice electronics entirely.
Sun 11th Feb 2007 4:25 pm 
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