And if so, what is this feature called?
In a plant floor setting I would like to simplify the a printing systems for the maintenance folks.
Each station consists of a very small form factor Windows 7/10 PC and an Ethernet printer. The PC has a single Ethernet port and cannot be easily expanded to two.
Right now each PC and printer has an manually assigned network IP address. The installed printer drivers have ports assigned to the printer for that particular line and spare printer.
The problem comes when things get shifted do to repairs or testing. Over time as the number of units have increased it is getting harder to manage each station as replacing a computer or printer requires a lot of reconfiguration.
I would like to simplify the process by doing the following:
- Set the PC to DHCP and have the DHCP server set a fixed IP via the MAC.
- Set a secondary fixed address on the Ethernet card in all the computers to some public IP (Ex: 192.168.1.1)
- Set all the printers for all lines to the same address such on that network such as 192.168.1.2
This is the step I don't know if it can be done with a managed switch:
Configure pairs of ports on the switch to separate VLANs so that each pair share the same 192.168.1.0 subnet. The means that the printer on port 2 and the printer on port 4 do not overlap because they are on separate VLANs but have the same address. We do not expect to be able to reach the printers from outside their paired PC.
Allow the main LAN traffic on the network to reach the PC via its primary DHCP assigned address.
- Repeat on additional pairs of ports for additional stations.
This question is meant to determine if it this is a valid feature of smart manged switches or is strictly a routing problem.