I'm a networking noob and I really need help.   I have 3 routers, and I want to be able to talk to all three of them but my NAS box only has one ethernet port.  I added two VLANs in the network settings but I can only ping the primary router on br0, br0.2 and br0.3 routers are not pingable.  Can someone take a look at my network settings and give me some advice.  

 

 

Edited December 26, 20223 yr by nerbonne
marking solved

the main question is? WHY do you want to do this?

 

Usually people think that more than one gateway gives a kind of fault tolerance, and usally they are utterly wrong.

The problem is not really INSIDE your LAN, but from the Outside.

People get to your server by a name in DNS, lets say "www.example.com".

You can put more than one addresses behind this name and DNS will be so nice to do "round robin" (responding each question of this name with the NEXT address, if the list is exhausted, they start again with the first).

So if 3 people ask for your server the 1st gets Gateway1, the 2nd gets Gateway2 and the 3rd gets Gateway3.

GREAT!

GREAT?

not really, 2 and 3 will hang in thin air and get nothing!

why?

As long as Gateway1 is up and running, it has precedence. So if a request comes in from Gateway3 the answer is send back via gateway1 !!! (of course the originator is not prepared for this and throws away the answer. So this request can never be finished)

 

To be short: your Idea with more than one gateway wont work and you should forget it really fast.

 

My use case has nothing to do with WAN traffic.  I have two internet connections, one for my gaming pc's and one for my server.  The wifi is connected to the gaming lan.  I have a wifi camera that I want to connect to a blue iris docker container on the server lan.  Therefore, I need the server lan to connect to the gaming lan.  Physically, the two lan's are connected.  (Tecnically I have a 3rd WAN connection but we don't need to discuss that as it is outside the scope of the question).  Additionally, it is not possible for me to use one router for both WAN connections, I must use two router as they are physically separated and the link between the two is wifi.  Therefore, the question at hand is, "is it possible to make one network card talk to two routers".

 

While I do appreciate that you took the time to respond, you read into my question and answered a question which I did not have.

23 minutes ago, nerbonne said:

nswered a question which I did not have.

No, I answered a question that you did not have in mind and do not understand I am afraid.

To gain access to the other lans, you do not have to do anything in UNRAID, delete those VLANs and you are done.

 

You say the lans are physically connected, but are they also are logically connected? Just plugging all of them into the same switch does nothing (just producing a bit of chaos).

 

Alternative 1:

What you need is to add specific routes into the gateways.

 

G1 needs to know how to reach G2 and vice versa.

This usually implies to give them a 2nd address from the other net and add a manual manual route into the routing table of the router (thus overwriting the default route for this lan)

 

Alternative 2:

OR you can tell your switch to use VLANs, #1 for the port of Gateway1, #2 for G2 and #3 for G3. And you put the UNRAID port into #1+#2+#3.

You can keep your current VLANs then, but you have to delete the default Gateway on the settings #2 and #3.

UNRAID will then talk to the outside world on G1, but sends out packets to the LAN addresses to 2 & 3 tagged with the appropriate VLAN ID.

(It is up to the switch to deliver them to the correct ports)

First of all you have to check if your switch is capable of handling VLANs at all ("unmanaged" one surely are not, for "managed" ones look into the manual, normally they can handle it)

Without switch support nothing will work.

 

There are more possible alternatives for this situations, but they usually need additinal hardware like a Layer-3 Switch/Router. This would be an overkill for such few devices I fear.

 

 

 

Edited December 19, 20223 yr by MAM59

I have a layer 3 switch.  I bought a third NIC, so I feel like that's the simplest way to solve this issue, as having 3 NICs will just allow me to connect to all three routers simultaneously, as I already have dual NICs and I can talk to two routers.  Thanks for taking the time to reply.

If you have an L3 Switch already, then why dont you use it for what it is designed for?

 

Get rid of all but one NICs in UNRAID, use the L2Switch as the default Gateway for all Devices on all LANs and tell the switch to do the failover routing to the 3 gateways.

 

No need to play with complicated network settings on the PCs.

 

Edited December 26, 20223 yr by MAM59