Reply 20 of 32, by dionb
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Depending on your interests, intentions and experience, managed switches can be useful.
You generally don't want to give vintage stuff full internet access, but you might want to be able to communicate with new machines (so you can download stuff on them, unpack files and generally store stuff). That screams 'VLANs', and for VLANs you need managed switches (and a router that understands them).
Basically the idea would be to have at least two VLANs in your network, one for the vintage stuff without internet access, one for new machines. You would then make a trunk (connection with all VLANs on it in tagged form) between router and switch(es) and then assign remaining ports to one VLAN or the other (untagged), so your clients (new or old) don't have to be aware or support anything related to VLANs but you can assign each to the correct one. Then you need to configure IP scopes for both in you router, and assign some ACL/routing rules (like: "allow vintage VLAN traffic to/from regular VLAN, deny vintage VLAN traffic to/from internet")