this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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Sorry for being such a noob. My networking is not very strong, thought I'd ask the fine folks here.

Let's say I have a Linux box working as a router and a dumb switch (I.e. L2 only). I have 2 PCs that I would like to keep separated and not let them talk to each other.

Can I plug these two PCs into the switch, configure their interfaces with IPs from different subnets, and configure the relevant sub-interfaces and ACLs (to prevent inter-subnet communication through the router) on the Linux router?

What I'm asking is; do I really need VLANs? I do need to segregate networks but I do not trust the operating systems running on these switches which can do L3 routing.

If you have a better solution than what I described which can scale with the number of computers, please let me know. Unfortunately, networking below L3 is still fuzzy in my head.

Thanks!

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[–] marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for that. I'd also like to ask you: is that a possibility too if one were to configure a trunk port on a switch and plug the PCs in?

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That would be worse, because then it would send and receive traffic for multiple vlans.

Unless your switch uses that to refer to link aggregation instead of vlan trunking. Network terminology like that can mean different things to different vendors.

I'm using Cisco terminology so it likely means VLAN trunking unfortunately (unless I missed something)