Met a guy at a coffee shop who changed how I think about subnets

So I was sitting at this local coffee shop in Austin last month, waiting for my latte, and this older dude notices my laptop has a network diagram on screen. He asks what I'm working on, and I tell him I'm trying to figure out why our office VLANs keep overlapping. He just laughs and says 'stop thinking of subnets as walls, think of them as doors instead.' That totally clicked for me. He went on to explain how he sets up his commercial networks with a /23 for flexibility but uses ACLs to control traffic instead of strict subnet boundaries. It's been a month since I tried his approach on a small office build and it's working way smoother. Has anyone else run into an old school trick like that that just made everything simpler?

2 comments

2 Comments

joelsanchez3d ago

Huh, that door analogy works great until you have a boss who sees ACLs as voodoo.

hugo506h ago

Has he actually tried sitting down with you to go over a few ACL examples? Most of the time when people call ACLs "voodoo" it's because they never took 20 minutes to understand the logic behind them. Show him how deny and allow rules work with a simple network diagram and the "magic" usually goes away real quick.