Question : Multiple VLANs to a single Gateway

Situation: Provide 23 network connections to provide internet access to users in a shared office space envinroment.

Requirement: network must be configure such that all users can access the gateway to the internet but must not be able to see other hosts with in the local network.

Equipment: 1 Linksys BEFVP41 Broadband VPN router and 1 Nortel Baystack 350-24T with the latest firmware.

Question:
 is it possible to create 23 additional  VLANs each VLAN would include 1 switch port and the port that the gateway is plugged into, I know that the port being used by the gateway must be configured as a trunk port to allow it to function as a member of multiple VLANs. What other situations need to be addressed??? By default all ports are members of the Default managment VLAN 1 do i need to remove all the ports from VLAN 1? Does the router need to be able to preform VLAN tagging to talk to multiple VLANs concurrently?

I am currently having problems when removing all ports from vlan 1 they all lost connectivity to the Gateway, if i set the port from the gateway to the Tagged Trunk option it will no longer talk to the switch (unable to ping from the switch to the router). do i need to use tagging if all VLANs exsist with in the same switch? is there an option to disable tagging on the Baystack 350, current the only options i have are to set ports as Untagged Access ports or Tagged Trunk ports.

any info would be appreciated

Paul

Answer : Multiple VLANs to a single Gateway

To answer your Questions:
alot of this is based on the Nortel implmenetation of what a vlan is, but here are a coupple of general rules for VLANS:

You need to TAG a port for it to belong to multipule VLANs *UNLESS* you are multinetting, witch means a port can belong to as many vlans as you want it to, untagged.  It will just simply get the traffic of all vlans on that port.

I think the best thing for your sitiation if you can setup Multinetting is to do it!  for example if port 1 was your uplink, add all VLANS (Untagged) to port 1 and add Vlan2 to port 2 (Untagged) Vlan 3 to Port 3..... Etc.  Doing it this will seperate you from haveing to deal with multipule IP addresses and gateways etc.  The key is to turn ON multinetting, it probably is not on by default.

Some switches (Nortel is not one of them to my knowledge) support a feature called "VLAN aggragation" witch would also accomplish what you are trying to do.