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Comment by masterofmisc | Hacker News Reader

Your right. Ive been saying for years that routers should come with 2 networks (vlans) out of the box (colour coded red and blue) to make it easier to seperate out kit/appliances. One side for IoT stuff that you dont trust and the other side for our own equipment. But as you mention, even then consumers need to know how to set the networks up etc. As the old adage goes, you dont know what you dont know.

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The issue with two networks is that many IoT things work by interacting with other things/users. A Philips Hue bridge or a Chromecast need to be accessible from the network you're on. And they rely on things like multicast and UPnP to function, which are hard if not impossible to do cross-vlan ( i looked into putting my Chromecasts on a different vlan and the setup was quite heavy).

Agree. I even gave up on keeping the christmas light IoT device on the other network, because the whole point was to be able to control the lights with the phone, and having to switch my phone between networks was just too much.

What needs to happen here is that my master devices (my phone, my laptop) need to be able to stay connected to many networks at the same time, and then I have to be able to assign different apps to different networks.

It depends on how they work. IIRC the Hue bridge connection can be statically configured with an IP, and then some firewall rules should be enough ( authorise your main network to talk to the Hue IP).

That still doesn't fix the fact that it relies on network broadcasts for many core functionality (app discovery of the hub, etc). Putting your IoT devices on their own VLAN sounds like a good idea, but they usually aren't designed to work in that sort of situation and you're likely to create a bunch of usability and management problems that won't be solved with firewall rules.

Many routers already come with two networks separated with vlans. It's a common feature on TP-Link devices, among many others. They call it "Guest network", which makes it really easy to understand.

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