I had previously posted a question here about an issue I was having with the RB493AH and switching. When ports 3-9 were set to be slaves of port 2, everything worked fine except the ports were acting more like a hub than a switch. That is, any internet traffic destined to one PC plugged into the switch was being sent to ALL ports on the RB493. Note that the outgoing traffic was not visible to other ports (only incoming traffic).
So I did some more reading and ended up creating a bridge interface and added the ports to the bridge with the following commands:
/interface bridge
add name="LAN"
/interface bridge port
add bridge=LAN interface=ether2 horizon=1
add bridge=LAN interface=ether3 horizon=1
add bridge=LAN interface=ether4 horizon=1
add bridge=LAN interface=ether5 horizon=1
add bridge=LAN interface=ether6 horizon=1
add bridge=LAN interface=ether7 horizon=1
add bridge=LAN interface=ether8 horizon=1
add bridge=LAN interface=ether9 horizon=1
Once configured in this bridge, the switch acted more like a switch and the traffic was no longer sent to all ports.
I have used many RB750G and RB-751 devices which don’t use a bridge for each port, instead they set up the ports as slaves. I just want to learn why it was necessary to create the bridge on the 493? Is this something that is transparently handled by the 75x devices? How come when I set the ports up as slaves the router would send the traffic out of all ports instead of the 1 port which was connected to the destination MAC address?
Thanks for any information or help.