Snakeoil Salesman 2 channel setup

[agent_kith]

BTW, before anyone goes out and buy a Layer 2 switch. Note that somewhere in your network you'll need a layer 3 device (router) to do the inter-VLAN routing. e.g. if you only have a layer 2 switch, and with two VLANS 10 and 100. Traffic in VLAN 10 cannot talk to VLAN 100 without going through a router first.

If your Internet/ADSL router suppors VLAN, that can do the job. But most of these devices are also slow, they may have gigabit ports but they cannot transfer at that speed. So it'll kill all the benefits. Expensive routers is not necessary a fast one, e.g. the Meraki MX64 router can only route at 250 Mbps.

You'd be much better off just go with a good LPSU with a normal switch instead.

The reason why I set up my network this way? It allows me:

1. to talk to all my devices on the network, while they only can see what I want them to see
   
2. I can do very high bandwidth stuffs that will saturate a 1000 Mbps port, and yet the quality of my stereo setup remains unaffected
   
3. turn on port isolation
   
4. Sniff traffic directly on the switch
   
5. Intrusion detection and prevention by analaysing network for threats.
   

None of those are probably important to anybody else. If you want to cut down on the extra network traffic, this can be accomplished in a much simpler way:

1. Add another network card (or a network card with multiple LAN ports), connect this directly to the NAS (they usually have multiple LAN ports)
   
2. Disable DHCP server and assign static IPs everywhere
   

That'll take 5 minutes top to do.