I am using a CCR1009 at home for a few weeks now and I am quite enjoying it.
I started off using ports 1-6 as a logic switch via the bridge function. At first I thought ports 1-4 use the switch chip automatically but now found out that they don’t. So I changed my config and set ether1 as a master port for the following ports to act as a “real” switch. But this way I can not add ports 5 and 6 to my switch. The master port function is not enabled for “true” Layer 3 ports as it seems.
Now I would like to know how I can include ports 5-6 into my switch? I know they wouldn’t pass traffic through the switch chip, but still I would like them to be part of the logical switch unit. Is there a way to bridge them in? I tried to put ports 1,5 and 6 into a bridge and configure ether1 as a master for 2,3 and 4 at the same time. That was just an idea that came to my mind but it didn’t work.
Anyone know how I can achieve this? Or is bridging all 6 ports the only way?
That is odd, because that is the correct way to do it. Maybe something else in your configuration was off? You might want to try again and post exports of /bridge and /interface ethernet in here in case it doesn’t work again. Which RouterOS version are you running on your CCR?
You can’t include them in the switch because they have no connection to the switch chip. You want to set ports 2, 3, and 4 as slave to port 1 which will create a 4 port wire-speed switch. Any devices connected to those ports will share the 1 Gbps link between the switch chip and the CPU (really, you can use any of those 4 ports as the Master port). I would have thought a bridge between the Master port and ports 5+ would have worked, but you already tried that to no avail. I think bridging all 6 ports is your only option short of plugging a larger switch into one of the ports to get the desired port count.
It will. DHCP will be working the same for all ports involved in bridge and for all ports that are eventually enslaved by swith to bridged ports. You need just to make full ip settings the bridge (assign IP address, netmask, routing, DHCP server and so). Also adjust your firewall rules if applicable.
Alright, now I set it up like I already did before. Ether1, 5 and 6 as bridge and 2, 3 and 4 as slaves to ether1. DHCP is running on the bridge and it just works perfectly fine now. My file transfer speeds between my PC and my NAS even increased from ~95MB/s to ~105MB/s. CPU load has gone down to 0 of course.
I think the reason why it did not work before is because I left the DHCP on ether1. But on the other hand at least ports 1-4 should have worked fine together in this case, right? Weird then I guess. Maybe there was another mistake in my config on top of that. Can not remember what it might have been.
Well, actually no, because ether1 was enslaved to bridge1 (or whatever you called your bridge) and any configuration made on a slave port does not work in most cases.
There is nothing special about such configurations.
Just make a bridge and move everything that is configured on ether1 (IP, DHCP, firewall, …) to the bridge.
Make ether1, ether5 and ether6 a port on the bridge.
Make ether2, ether3 and ether4 a slave of ether1.
Then it just works. Put the systems with the most internal traffic on ether1..ether4.
CPU load has gone down to 0 of course.