Accessing switch from different vlan

coolbud98 · March 1, 2018

I have been hunting around forums for weeks trying to find a solution to my problem but have been unable to find one. I am currently enrolled at a college and work in the IT department. The problem I am having is that I want to access the staff vlan from my room for work purposes, but also want to be able to switch back to the student vlan so that I can play Minecraft over lan with other students. There is only one physical port going from the switch in the dorm to my room. Currently I have to go to a computer that's on the staff vlan in order to telnet over to the switch that manages my room in order to switch back and forth between vlans. My question is this: is there any way that I can access the switch directly from my room even when I am on the student vlan so that I can easily switch back to staff?

alexicon · March 1, 2018

Depends on the security on the switch and in the network. Technically you can just put in the IP of the switch and reach it by routing to it through your gateway. But I bet your gateway has ACLs that block this.

The other alternative is to change the port to your room from access to trunk and then get a managed switch of your own that puts your desktop traffic onto the student vlan and another device on to a different vlan.

if you only have one device, setup one port on your personal switch to be an access vlan for the student network and a different port to be on the staff network and then just plug into whichever you want to use at that time.

I'm not responsible if you get fired. Or worse. Expelled. =D

Mikensan · March 3, 2018

Why not just trunk the port for the 2 VLANs you need access to, then go into your NIC settings and set the VLAN? Whenever you need to flip-flip just change the VLAN. Go to the properties of your network card (if you're going to the adapter properties, just click "Configure" to get to the network card properties). Go to Advanced, scroll down to VLAN and set your VLAN...

Otherwise just RDP / Teamviewer / Whatever to a desktop that does have access to the VLAN.