I am helping a friend manage a shared internet connection in an apartment buildling with 80 apartments - 8 stairways with 10 apartments in each. The network is laid out with the internet router at one end of the building, connected to a cheap non-managed 16 port switch in the first stairway where the first 10 apartments are also connected. One port is connected to another 16 port cheapo switch in the next stairway, where those 10 apartments are connected, and so forth. Sort of a daisy chain of switches, with 10 apartments as spokes on each "daisy". The building is a U-shape, approximately 50 x 50 meters, 20 meters high - so from the router to the farthest apartment it’s probably around 200 meters including up-and-down stairways.

We have a fair bit of problems with people hooking up wifi-routers the wrong way, creating rogue DHCP servers which interrupt large groups of the users and we wish to solve this problem by making the network smarter (instead of doing a physical unplugging binary search).

With my limited networking skills, I see two ways - DHCP-snooping or splitting the entire network into separate VLANS for each apartment. Separate VLANS gives each apartment their own private connection to the router, while DHCP snooping will still allow LAN gaming and file sharing.

Will DHCP snooping work with this kind of network topology, or does that rely on the network being in a proper hub-and-spoke-configuration? I am not sure if there are different levels of DHCP snooping - say like expensive Cisco switches will do anything, but inexpensive ones like TP-Link, D-Link or Netgear will only do it in certain topologies?

And will basic VLAN support be good enough for this topology? I guess even cheap managed switches can tag traffic from each port with it’s own VLAN tag, but when the next switch in the daisy chain receives the packet on it’s “downlink” port, wouldn’t it strip or replace the VLAN tag with it’s own trunk-tag (or whatever the name is for the backbone traffic).

Money is tight, and I don’t think we can afford professional grade Cisco (I have been campaigning for this for years), so I’d love some advice on which solution has the best support on low-end network equipment and if there are some specific models that are recommended? For instance low-end HP switches or even budget brands like TP-Link, D-Link etc.

If I have overlooked another way to solve this problem it is due to my lack of knowledge. :)