Tag: iot

VLANs and Samsung TV's

If you’re anything like me you’ll have a bunch of IoT smart home devices; if you’re anywhere as cheap as me, a number of those will only work on 2.4GHz networks which makes using the Google Wifi a right pain1. I did eventually get the devices registered but only after many many repeated pairing/registration attempts. Presumably they would randomly latch onto the 2.4GHz network and be able to complete the process but it was frustrating work.

The internet also tells us just how all these cheap devices are realistically insecure and that you should be keeping them on a separate network so with that I decided to upgrade my network gear so I could implement secure things, like VLANs and ACLs and all of that fun stuff but I was using a Google WiFi mesh and although it did the job pretty well it just didn’t offer any power user features at all - primarily it didn’t do VLANs, or even more than one WiFi network which meant getting any sort of separation from my potentially badly behaved devices was next to impossible.

So I upgraded the hardware.