this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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VLAN’s and Subnets For Home Networks (www.pragmaticcoding.ca)
submitted 5 hours ago by HamsterRage@lemmy.ca to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
9 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

For the past few years I've been building and maintaining website/blog at www.pragmaticcoding.ca. It's mostly about programming, and more specifically it's ended up having a lot of content about JavaFX with Kotlin.

Lately, I've been spending all of my time building out my own homelab and self-hosting the services that I need. I've got a little stack of M910Q's running in a Proxmox cluster with an HP T740 running OPNSense.

Since I've been spending all - and I do mean all - of my time futzing about with this self-hosted stuff, I thought I'd try to add some content to my website to help people doing the same thing. My idea was to make it more "bloggish", talking about the tricky things I've had to master along the way as I implement various services.

But I feel like there also needs to be some foundational content. Articles that explain concepts that a lot of people, especially people without professional networking experience, find difficult to grasp. So I've started working on those.

While I think of myself as mostly a programmer, my career (now, thankfully over) had me as an "IT Guy" more often than not. I spent 24 years at the same mid-sized company with a tiny IT department and simply had to get involved with infrastructure stuff because there was nobody else to do it. It was very hands-on at first, but as we grew I was able be limit my involvement to planning and technical strategy.

Since the mid 90's, we went from self-hosted physical servers, to colocated servers, to colocated virtual servers to cloud servers and services. So I feel like I have the insight to provide help.

Anyways, this is the first article in this new section. I've seen a lot of people posting questions about how VLAN's work and I know that it's mystifying to many. So I wanted to push it out before I have the supporting framework put together on the website, and it's just sitting there as the first post that's not about programming.

My goal is to provide practical, pragmatic advice. I'm not particularly worried if some particular facet of an article isn't 100% totally correct on some obscure technical level...as long as the article gives solid practical advice that readers can act on.

Anyways, take a look and let me know if you think this kind of article might me of use to yourself or other people getting started on self-hosting.

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[–] SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

I know that people often find IPv6 confusing and that's fine, but at the very least you need to explain that you're specifically talking about IPv4 IP and Subnetting configuration and that is very much how things used to be done. IPv6 is finally gaining real adoption and can make a lot of things confusing.

For example, until I got a handle of IPv6, my Android phone never had proper ad-blocking from my Pi-Holes because Google would make Android auto-configure an IPv6 DNS address that would bypass my IPv4 DNS addresses. Even if I filled every IPv4 DNS slot, my phone would still automatically make a slot for the IPv6 DNS and fill it with a Google-chosen DNS. There were two ways to fix this, and I've done both: Set up IPv6 and fill that slot with my Pi-Hole IPv6 DNS address, and/or setting up a VPN that hands out the Pi-Holes as DNS and bypasses Google's auto-configurations entirely. I ended up with both because I also use the VPN to keep ad-blocking functional on my phone while I'm away from home.

Especially in keeping with your "Zero trust" idea, you can't have rogue IPv6 traffic all over your network unless you've managed to disable IPv6 on every network interface and the traffic is just being dumped since it's disabled. (Also, personal opinion, subnetting on IPv6 is so much more elegant and straightforward than on IPv4)

Finally, you mention "bytes" (it's actually bits) and CIDR notation, but that's probably more confusing than illuminating if someone has no idea that an IPv4 address has four sets of octets (eight bits) for a 32-bit addressing scheme. You might consider expanding on how IPv4 addresses function to make that a little clearer.

[–] HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 hours ago

Thanks for the feedback. I will make some changes to the article. IPv6 wasn't even on my radar since I haven't got around to using it myself yet.

[–] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 7 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Small advice: would be nice if there was a dark mode, so I can read it at night. (without flash bang)

[–] mal3oon@lemmy.world 5 points 1 hour ago

Dark reader on firefox has been a life saver on many websites. It works even on mobile (fennec).

[–] HamsterRage@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 hours ago

I'll have a look at it. The whole site is Jekyll using a theme called "Minimal Mistakes", so there's two things for me to look at. I suspect it's the theme, and I've customized it enough that it's probably "broken" when it comes to updates.

[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 hours ago

This is a good write up, thank you!

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 0 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 59 minutes ago) (1 children)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
IP Internet Protocol
VPN Virtual Private Network

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.

[Thread #75 for this comm, first seen 8th Feb 2026, 20:40] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] DieserTypMatthias@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

VLAN is a virtual local area network. Basically what it does is that it can segment out your network to not bring it down or crawl it to a halt when under load.

[–] FrederikNJS@piefed.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

In addition people often use VLANs for security segregation. For example you might buy a bunch of cheap Chinese security cameras, but want to ensure that they can't send anything back to the manufacturer. Then you can make a VLAN with no Internet access for the cameras.