this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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I'm super confused here...
Can you detail all the devices involved here, the ports they have, and where you want them connected to?
In general, there's zero reason a single machine would have two ports connected to the same network. If they were part of DIFFERENT networks like a WAN/LAN split, then it would make sense.
Edit: Was unfamiliar with this board. Honestly, I'd bootstrap it with OpenWRT and skip the manual Debian route if you intend to use this as a gateway router. If you're not familiar with the networking side of things as it is, you're going to introduce some serious lapses in security most likely.
Sorry, I'm really bad at explaining things, and I'm also confused with this.
I'm using this device (a banana pi r3):
The 4 ports marked as 4x GigE LAN are shown in ip addr as lan0@eth0 up to lan3@eth0. The GigE WAN/LAN port is shown as wan in the ip addr output. (I will post the full ip addr output soon, because I locked myself out from ssh access >.<)
The wan port is connected to my home router, and in the lan ports, I have 4 other devices connected. I want to have all devices connected to the banana pi lan ports available for accessing from any device connected from my home router. I also want the banana pi board to be accessible via ssh from some static ip
Okay...so you're kind of using this as a switch then? Any reason you want these devices plugged directly into this board instead of all of them directly to your router or just a regular switch?
In your use case, I'd still default to OpenWRT, regardless. It's going to be a LOT easier for you manage.
I tried openwrt first, and indeed, the network configuration was much easier, but then everything else was much more difficult and time consuming. Even system updates seemed overly complicated. I plan on running a few things on it, like zoneminder and syncthing, that will be much easier to maintain on debian
As for the reason, I got no more free ports in my router, and If I added another regular router, I wouldn't be able to run software on it, and would need an additional device, so this one allows me to add just one more device to the network. Well, considering that I manage to properly configure it...
The main issue here is that you essentially just want it to be a switch and not a router, which is going to be problematic if you intend to pass traffic amongst them in different ways.
The way you're describing this working would be routing traffic on the uplink port to your router from the other interfaces. You'll need this because a stock Debian install runs network interfaces as clients and not routed interfaces that pass traffic. You're basically building another router and making certain other ports switch interfaces.
This is a bit more complex than just getting a $10 cheap unmanaged switch and hanging that off your router for extra ports, but if you're determined to go this route, you basically just need to look up routing traffic in Debian and you'll find some guides.
Thank you, I will check about routing traffic