Bond confusion

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

I’m using a MikroTik CRS226-24G-2S+IN running RouterOS 6.33.5 and I want to know if it is possible to create a bonded interface and have that bond be a member of another interface?
I’d like to bond together the 2 fiber ports and have that bond stay in ether1-master.


/interface ethernet
set [ find default-name=ether1 ] name=ether1-master
set [ find default-name=ether2 ] master-port=ether1-master
set [ find default-name=ether3 ] master-port=ether1-master
...
set [ find default-name=ether22 ] master-port=ether1-master
set [ find default-name=ether23 ] master-port=ether1-master
set [ find default-name=ether24 ] master-port=ether1-master
set [ find default-name=sfpplus1 ] master-port=ether1-master
set [ find default-name=sfpplus2 ] master-port=ether1-master

For my setup each ether port has a general purpose Linux machine attached to it and a NAS device is attached to sfpplus1.

Each device gets its IP address from a DHCP server running on the device attached to ether1. I’d like to connect the NAS using both of the available fiber ports but bonding the ports creates a new interface which does not get addresses from the DHCP server running on the computer attached to ether1.

Is it possible to bond the 2 fiber ports and get an address assign on the bond from the machine attached to ether1?

2

I don’t think you’re going to have much success doing what you describe. Bonding is performed at the CPU, whereas master/slave is a switch chip function. Bonded ports have to be passed through to the CPU instead of using a master/slave configuration. Now, you could easily pass the two SFP ports to the CPU and bond them, but the CPU in the CRS is so weak that you will not get good performance, on top of the fact that the physical architecture of the circuit board only allows for 1 Gbps of traffic between the switch chip and the CPU. Bonding on a CRS can only provide redundancy, not a performance increase.

3

the physical architecture of the circuit board only allows for 1 Gbps of traffic between the switch chip and the CPU

So you are saying that bonding the 2 SFP ports in any configuration immediately throttles the maximum throughput to 1 Gpbs? Is this documented anywhere?

What about Network Address Translation, I guess this is performed on the CPU and the expected performance wouldn’t be very good?