Something that came up, using RB2011 series as a basis
Gb Lan ports can be slaved together and the 10/100MBs can be slaved together
We then need to bridge the WAN, Gb, 10/100 and SFP
Which led to a discussion why bother creating slaves and just add all 10 Ethernet ports to the bridge?
Is there a differance in that the Slave offloads Software CPU cycles onto the hardware or are both functions a software feature?
Which also leads me to a question is there a way to add all the ports via Winbox to a bridge instead of one at a time? or forcing me to a terminal, and up arrow and change the ether number? I guess I could script it…
Switch feature uses the switch chip hardware so the traffic between ports never touches the CPU, allowing wire speed between ports. Bridging is all done in the software and has to touch the CPU for that. You can get finer control with a bridge since you can send the traffic through the firewall as well, but at the cost of CPU cycles and performance.
I don’t think there is a way of mass adding interfaces to a bridge. Just one command at a time, but by using the CLI you can type out the command and easily copy and paste it and edit it to fit your needs.