Backhauling a WAN across rooms using VLANs
I recently moved into a new apartment and faced a challenge when setting up the network: the ISP handoff was in a coat closet that didn’t have enough room for my network rack (but also, who wants to keep their network rack in an entryway closet?). Ideally, I wanted the rack to be in the office, and luckily the closet and the office share a wall. The simple solution would be to add an ethernet run between the closet and the office to get the WAN connection from the ISP handoff to the rack. But there was one complication: the closet had an ethernet drop to the living room that I wanted to utilize. So, I needed the single cable between the closet and the office to carry both the WAN connection back to the rack, and a LAN connection for uplinking the living room. I’ve read discussions about using VLANs to backhaul a WAN connection back to the main server rack and figured that’d work great for my use case. ...