Router with multiple subnets, no managed switch
Hello everyone, I am trying to update a small network: the router is an ER605, the AP are EAP610s, the network is managed via an omada software controller installed with docker on a local server.
My question is: is it possible to configure the router to have 3 subnets as follows where any device on any of these networks would be able to talk to any other device freely?
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192.168.1.0/24 -> router is 192.168.1.1, devices are configured with static IP
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192.168.2.0/24 -> router is 192.168.2.1, 192.168.2.2-254 is reserved for DHCP
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192.168.100.0/24 -> router is 192.168.100.1, devices are configured with static IP
I thought it was going to be as easy as creating the three networks in the Settings -> Wired networks -> LAN and assigning them to all the router's interfaces however this does not seem to work.
Devices with DHCP do not get any IP address assigned to them and devices with statically assigned 192.168.100.0/24 or 192.168.2.0/24 addresses cannot even ping the router at 192.168.100.1 or 192.168.2.1
I tried reading forums and documentation and I suspect this has something to do with VLANs, however I am not really familiar with this concept.
I get that each of the three networks I created has VLAN id and that typically there would be a managed switch whose ports would be configured to use one or more of these networks, but is it not possible to do this without a managed switch, just assigning all ports of the router to access all networks? I could not find any information about this, but I do not understand if it's because it's something extremely trivial or extremely dumb/wrong or even impossible...
I also read that some unmanaged switches might drop VLAN-tagged packets, so I tried a point-to-point direct connection to the router, but nothing changed.
Also note that there is no correlation between physical location and the subnet a device should connect to (i.e. any wall plug or swith port and even the APs might be connected to a device on any of the three subnets).
If anyone could point out any errors I made, or point me in the right direction if I am approaching this the wrong way I would be extremely thankful