On Sun, 4 Jun 2023, o1bigtenor via Dng wrote:

>
> Should I switch my present router from 192.168.1.1 to my chosen
> 172.16.x.x (I'm running on dd-wrt)?

Do you want your sensors (assumed ethernet connected) to use the router and
be able to access / be accessed from the internet?

If yes then do it.

    How are existing machines network configured? 

      If they are manually configured you will have give them numbers in 
      the new network range. If you let your router do DHCP, then you 
      should be ok.

      How are the sensors network configured? If using DHCP, can your DHCP 
      server manage that numbers of DHCP clients? You may have to configure 
      your routers DHCP server to have a big enough range of addresses to 
      hand out.

If no then it would be better to use the existing 192.168.1.0 network for
those machines that need internet access, and use the bigger 172.16.x.x
addresses for the sensors and the machine they talk to. You can run
several networks on the same phyical LAN. You will have to put the
machine the sensors talk to on this network as well. A linux network
interface has have several addresses.

https://kifarunix.com/create-virtual-secondary-ip-addresses-on-an-interface-in-linux/

In this case I would manually configure my machine with fixed IP addresses
in both networks.



> (Any suggestions for how to learn more about networking without buying
> hugely pricey Cisco courses?)

There are 2 aspects of this - 1 is learning about how networks work, and
then learning about the various tools various mequipment give you to
configure the network. Linux gives you lots of options.

TCP/IP networking Ref guide

http://www.penguintutor.com/linux/basic-network-reference


Ubuntu's Introduction to networking ...

https://ubuntu.com/server/docs/network-introduction



Try this

https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/sysadmin-essentials-networking-basics

It covers the basic CLI commands reasonably well.

You could try the Debian reference doc

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-reference/ch05.en.html

here are some others ...

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/network-interface-configure

https://github.com/facyber/awesome-networking

https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/gg243376.pdf