Home Automation and VLANs

[u/hexlandus]

So, in moving to a new property - I decided to take the opportunity to overhaul my home networking and automation experience that had organically grown over the last 10 years in the old place.

I have
- all Unifi equipment for networking (AC Pro, Dream Machine Pro, Switches, etc)
- Eufy S380 Homebase 3 (set up in Edge mode) with 5 x E30 4k indoor cameras and a dual camera doorbell.
- multiple Alexa's (various models) all over the house.
- Philips HUE Bridge
- Tons of HUE bulbs and remotes
- Hubitat C-8 Pro
- 3 x Apple TV 4K (Gen 3)

I also run an Aoostar WTR Max 8845 NAS running TrueNAS and Plex Server

I used to have a ton of Zigbee switches, dimmers and stuff - but I left those behind (I moved to a rental property and had no real need of them anymore)

So... I carefully partitioned my network into
- main (Server, PC's, etc)
- media (Xbox Series X, Smart TV's, Apple TV's, Roku, etc)
- iot (Alexa's, other bits and bobs)

What a pain in the ass that was - making sure that everything was partitioned, switch ports were set correctly, routing rules, etc.

Then I introduced the Apple TV into the network and thought
- "Hey, you know what would be cool? If I could control my lights and cameras with Apple HomeKit"

Then everything went to crap... now I can't control the lights, HUE hub lost connection, AppleTV can't connect to anything - I have no idea what just happened.

Home Automation seems to really rely on everything being on the same network - VLANs seem to really confuse this stuff.

Is the network partitioning really worth all the hassle? It would all work just fine if it was all on a single subnet.

Any advice? Pointers to useful guides? Hints? What did I do wrong? Is it really worth it?

[u/throwaway03711162]

I went through the same headache when I separated my IoT stuff. The mDNS reflection across VLANs is usually where it falls apart, especially with HomeKit and Hue. If your router has an option for mDNS repeater or bonjour forwarding between subnets that solves most of the discovery issues. You might also need to open specific ports between VLANs but that gets messy fast.

For me it wasn't worth the constant fiddling. I eventually moved everything except the NAS and my PC back to one flat network and just accepted the tradeoff. The smart home actually works now and I stopped spending evenings debugging multicast rules.

[u/HackItBetter_02 → u/throwaway03711162]

So real — literally me in another life. I went down the exact same rabbit hole with cross-VLAN mDNS reflection and opening up ports, and it just turned into a total mess. In the end, I realized spending half my nights debugging multicast rules just for 'isolation' really wasn't worth it. I caved too — besides the NAS and PC staying on the main network, everything else got tossed back onto one flat network. Now the smart home stuff finally works reliably, and getting a good night's sleep beats everything. So OP, stop banging your head against VLANs — just put the devices on the same subnet. If it works, it works, that's the bottom line.

[u/m3galinux]

I put everything IoT, including cameras and sensors, anything IP-based, on its own VLAN which has no default gateway and no routing to other subnets. Good luck harvesting all my data if you can't get out to the Internet, LG.... And who knows what the random selection of camera brands would be trying to contact. Best to not let them out. Security/privacy aspect makes it worth it to me. Most switches and sensors are Zigbee/Zwave via USB adapters so those aren't IP networked at all.

HomeAssistant and my DVR VM each have two network interfaces, one pointed at the IoT network and the other is on the normal users network. User commands and dashboards all go through one of those two VMs, so my user VLAN has no reason to route to IoT and vice versa.

I don't use Alexa or Apple Homekit or anything that relies on cloud/Internet, I imagine trying to use those types of devices would make this much more difficult. One of the hard requirements when I set all this up was everything had to still work when Internet was down, cloud connections can't be required through any part of any device's operation. And all devices still have to work manually if HomeAssistant dies too.