Accessing multiple VLANS through a router

[white91]

Hi all, fairly new to networking, at least at the routing level.

My network is actually in a theater, but still pretty small: three switches, two at FOH and one in the orchestra pit. There are two VLANs that I currently need frequent access to, VLANs 20 and 30, and I thought if I trunked those out of the switch into a router I could go ahead and plug my computer into a port on the router and access either of those VLANs instead of having to plug into a different access port on the switch. But I frankly have no clue how to configure the router to do this. Any help appreciated.

currently trying to do this with a 5-port Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X

 

[jea101]

try the Ubiquiti forums

https://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX/ct-p/EdgeMAX

 

[coxhaus]

I have never used a Ubiquiti router but a VLAN is the same on a router or a switch and that includes trunked ports. They are all the same anywhere in the network. You do NOT have to be on the router to access any of it. The router routes the VLAN network to all devices or not based on security and design.

I always assign a network to a VLAN. which makes VLANs layer 3.

 

[Mokers]

Can you let us know what equipment you are using with the edgerouter? It will help us get a better idea of what the equipment is capable of. Also, why does the system have separate VLANs?

In general, you don't necessarily need to trunk the port to your endpoint NIC in order to have access to the other VLAN. And just having a trunk port doesn't give you access to another VLAN if your computer is not configured with an IP address on that VLAN.

So if you have VLAN 20, 192.168.20. 0/24 and VLAN 30 192.168.30.0/24 trunked to a NIC with an IP address of 192.168.30.10, you will only see traffic from VLAN 30. VLANs may share an ethernet port, but logically they are as separate as two distinct networks. You would still need the router or the switch configured in such a way as to allow access between the VLANs.

Also, many operating systems don't read VLAN tagged traffic. Those settings are a part of the the network card driver. This means that you may not be able to connect to anything if you connect to a trunk port. Many switches have a way of designating the default VLAN for untagged traffic, which is likely how you are connecting to the LAN.