Hiya,

Thank you all for taking the time to reply and providing information.

I will update as I progress.

Best regards
David

Not quite, the LAN and WAN sides of the router are separate, one either side of the router. A domestic router basically has one WAN port and one LAN port, internally. However to make it more of an all-in-one device, they add a switch to the LAN side to allow you to add more than one device without having to add any external equipment. In fact, as you say, it might have yet another port dedicated to the WiFi card.

Of course this may all be physically on one chip internally, we're just talking about how they're connected logically i.e. what you care about when configuring things. What is sold as a 'router' is usually a combination of a modem, router, a WiFi access point and an Ethernet switch.

As others have said, if you happen to get a router with a VLAN-capable switch you can put each physical port in its own VLAN i.e. so each port is treated like a separate LAN. To my knowledge the vast majority of off-the-shelf WiFi routers won't support features like this, but you can do something similar with your own hardware if you were to set up a router on a PC with VLAN-capable NICs, and do VLAN trunking (basically a way of sending traffic of multiple VLANs over one physical connection) to a managed switch, and from there set up a port-based VLAN.

And also as others have said, there are many ways to achieve what you want. Personally I reckon 1:1 NAT is probably the most straightforward way from a functional point of view (routing/VLANs will require some additional thought to avoid breaking LAN communication) but there's no reason not to give more a try for fun! Just try to ensure you have a way of getting back online or resetting your router if you happen to lock yourself out.

@wayne386: FTTC shouldn't make any difference at all - from an IP point of view the physical connection used is largely irrelevant. You'd just need to ensure you either get a combined modem/router capable of supporting all of what you need, or a plain modem (or router capable of operating as just a modem) to put in front of the router you'll actually use.

Hiya,

I've done some cursory reading on 1:1 NAT. From what I have read, you can bind one external IP to one internal IP. Do you know of a way of binding one external IP to one internal network?

BR
David

Do you mean by using NAT?

To do that you'd need a way of defining/separating the internal networks, whether it's through VLANs, using separate NAT routers for each network or even just having each psuedo-LAN on its own subnet on the same physical LAN (by assigning the LAN interface on the router secondary IP addresses).

However if you use the last way, you'd probably be best with static IPs otherwise you'd have to start doing more advanced stuff with the DHCP server (again, it would need a way of knowing what each LAN actually is) such as assigning IPs/subnets based on MAC addresses etc - something you'd have to set up manually anyway.

In reply to a post by TrogLeDyte:

Hiya,

I've done some cursory reading on 1:1 NAT. From what I have read, you can bind one external IP to one internal IP. Do you know of a way of binding one external IP to one internal network?

BR
David

Yes. I have a mix of routed subnets, 1:1 NAT and many:1 NAT through a single router (until recently a D-Link DIR-825). The key thing, as others have said, is a router which has a switch which supports VLANs. Many domestic routers do, but support for it isn't available in the OEM firmware. The other key factor, then is to reflash the router with a better firmware. I use OpenWRT, but any of the open Linux based router firmwares should have the flexibility to do it. Pfsense will probably also be OK, but if you are using PC hardware you'll want multiple physical network interfaces unless you also have a separate switch which supports VLANs.
Take a look through the OpenWRT Table of Hardware, the device descriptions usually indicate if a router contains a switch the supports VLANs.

-Steve.

In reply to a post by essdee:

The key thing, as others have said, is a router which has a switch which supports VLANs.

VLAN support is only required if you wish the map the external IP addresses to different LAN's internally. If you just want some external IP's to map to specific hosts on the internal network then VLAN's are unnecessary. Though to be honest by the time you are looking at this level of sophistication any hardware worth looking at supports VLAN's.