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!

  • marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
    1·
    15 hours ago

    Ah, is that something like sticky ports?

    Indeed, I would like to run a switch with a FOSS OS, and I don’t see any viable way of doing that. Unfortunate, but whitebox router + switch it is then

    • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      14 hours ago

      The effect is similar to sticky ports, but sticky ports is just filtering based on Mac address, which can be spoofed.

      802.11x allows traffic from a device only if they also have the correct EAP certificate.