VLANS and ports and printing

[Steve224]

We currently have 2 VLANS and each port on the Meraki has devices on exactly 1 VLAN. Each of the ports is set up as a 'trunk' and the 'Native VLAN' matches the VLAN used by every device connected on that port.

I added a new VLAN as a test, but I did not change any of the LAN port settings on the MX. I changed the IP addresses on one of my printers to match the new VLAN, updated the printer's IP address and default gateway, but I cannot ping the printer from a device on a different VLAN. So for example, PC on 192.168.1.xx cannot ping printer at 192.168.3.xx

The only thing I can think of is that I didn't change the 'Native VLAN' settings. For comparison, I can successfully ping from 192.168.1.xx to a 192.168.2.xx address. The only difference I see is that the VLAN2 is connected to a port whose 'Native VLAN' is 2.

Could it be that the PC is not telling the Meraki which VLAN to talk to, so it assigns it to VLAN 1? (The PC and printer are both on ports whose 'Native VLAN' is 1)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[alemabrahao]

Could you share the configuration please?

[alemabrahao]

Now I understand better, yes the native VLAN is untagged in the package.
In your case, I don't see why leave it on trunk, so you can configure access on the desired VLAN.

Look this article.

https://networkdirection.net/articles/network-theory/taggeduntaggedandnativevlans/

[Steve224]

Thank you so much for the article! I'm a novice at networking so that article was very helpful, but it has made me question something I used to take for granted:

We often use Remote Desktop Connection from a VLAN 2 device to access a VLAN 1 device. How does this work? I imagine the VLAN 2 device gets 'tagged' at the 'Native VLAN 2' trunk port as 'VLAN 2', but then how does it get to a VLAN 1 device (which is behind a 'Native VLAN 1' trunk port)? 

We also do a similar thing through VPN, we connect to the office on VPN, then use RDC to take over our desktops for work. How does the VLAN tagging work for that?

[alemabrahao · Accepted solution]

This has nothing to do with VLAN tagging, it has nothing to do with routing.

Maybe it will help you to understand some concepts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qtKpZGoNdI

[BlakeRichardson]

Hopefully I have understood you properly. If you are trying to have devices on two different subnets communicate then you need to setup routes for this to happen. 

[DarrenOC]

as previously highlighted, change the switchport types from Trunk to Access and then assign the required VLAN number to each port

[Steve224]

Thanks for the responses everyone!

I'm in an unfortunate situation where my ability to 'test' network settings is very limited. I don't want to risk changing port types at the moment because the network is actively in use, and the physical cables are not labeled well enough for me to know what's plugged in to which port.

The real issue I am getting ready to tackle is this: our VLAN 1 network uses 192.168.1.xx, and we also use VPN and Remote Desktop Connection to access our VLAN 1 devices (desktop PCs). We do this so that we can connect and work from home and from client offices. 

However, we frequently run into an issue, and I think it is related to the IP address of the client office using '192.168.1.xx' as well as our office using the same IP address. We think the fix is to just change our VLAN addresses to something different, like '192.168.50.xx' to limit potential conflicts while using VPN from other sites.

In preparation to do that, I was tinkering with adding a new VLAN, but I think it may be best to just change the Address of VLAN 1 instead of creating an entirely new VLAN.