Vlans

[strawberry]

hello all, we've been offered a digital signage system that we would like to use over cat5, to do so we've been told we can use vlans or direct cat 5. We'd like to use a vlan but i have a few questions, how do you access a headless box if you not on the same vlan, and how would we set up that vlan with internet access ( my best guess is assign a port to the vlan and plug it into the firewall? )

[DMcCoy]

Either you will have do vlan routing to allow the devices in the signage vlan to access services or you will need to provide a port from each service you want to access on the signage vlan.

If you only need internet and for some workstation to manage the equipment then I would add a Tagged vlan to the workstation and proxy/firewall etc. This would avoid having to do any routing stuff. The only thing you would need to do is use a sepeate ip range for the ips in the signage vlan, this would allow you to add a static route to the proxy so it can talk to the devices (as it already has a gateway!)

I'm assuming each of the switches that will be used support vlans? if they aren't already set up it could be quite a lot of work to do!

If its one switch, life will be easier

[Geoff]

how do you access a headless box if you not on the same vlan

Via your router.

how would we set up that vlan with internet access ( my best guess is assign a port to the vlan and plug it into the firewall? )

Correct. Shove another NIC in your firewall and away you go. Unless your firewall is vlan aware. In which case you just enable vlan tagging for the relevant vlan on the port it's already plugged into and let the firewall know about the new vlan.