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Confused about VLANs

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• January 31, 2025 at 3:36 pm #6648
  Echo

  Participant

  Pcwrt router has four built in VLANs (X1, X2, X3, Guest), in addition to LAN, for each frequency (2.4 and 5). However, SSIDs can be associated with only four of five of those. That is plenty of SSIDs and VLANs for my purposes, so no complaints there. However, I figure there must be a reason for Pcwrt to allow SSIDs on four, but not all five. Can you comment on the reason, and provide any guidance and tips on how the LAN and VLANs are meant to be configured under this limitation. I cannot find much on the forum and under support on setting and configuring VLANs.

  January 31, 2025 at 5:16 pm #6650
  Echo

  Participant

  In general, can you point me to tutorials and posts for beginners (both to home networking and to pcwrt) explaining how VLANs are assigned to networks?

  January 31, 2025 at 7:32 pm #6652
  support

  Keymaster

  The reason we limit the number of WiFi VLANs to 4 (per band) is because some WiFi device drivers can only support a maximum of 4 SSIDs.

  VLANs on the pcWRT router are just separate networks that are isolated from each other. Each has their own IP address space. The only exception is “LAN”, which has the ability to start communication to other VLANs (by default, but you can change that if you want).

  VLANs are pre-created. What you can do on the router is to associate WiFi SSIDs or assign Ethernet ports to them. For example, if you assign Guest to Ethernet port 1, and create WiFi SSID bemyguest for Guest, then your computer connected to Port 1 and any devices connected to SSID bemyguest are on the same network (VLAN Guest).

  By default any device connected to VLANs other than the “LAN” do not have the ability to log in the router. When you visit the router URL, you’ll only see a link to display the device’s IP address and a link for Ad block control.

  We’ll need to create some new blog posts to explain things better. Thanks for bringing this up.

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