Hello,
I have gone through many posts and found many explanations on how the switch ships on the Mikrotik switches work but I’m still not able to wrap my mind around exactly what Master / Slave does. I have a couple of RB2011 Mikrotik routers that I have been working with and I’m completely confused. First, it appears that Port 1 is unusable as a switch port, that is, every master / slave / bridge / non configuration of the ports I have tried the router does not appear to pass traffic of any kind via port 1 (I’m assuming it would if I configured it as a router).
I have 2 laptops that I used trying to figure this out and the RB2011 is configured to factory defaults. The only settings I have messed with are the Master options on the ports and the “Switch All Ports” option under “Switch” all other settings are unchanged from the defaults. Basically I set each laptop pinging the other non-stop and watched to see what did / didn’t work as I changed settings and moved them to different ports on the router.
Ports 6-10 will not pass traffic between them unless configured with a master port. That is, I plug one laptop into port 9 and one into port 10 and if those ports are set to master “none” the laptops can not ping each other. If I set 9 and 10 to have a common master (port 6 for example) then they can ping each other. This wouldn’t seem odd to me if not for the fact that the ports on the gig switch chip will pass traffic between them regardless of being set to master “none” and regardless of “Switch all Ports” being selected or not.
So, why does the 100mb ports require a master be set while the gig ports do not ? Also, why is port 1 unusable regardless of how anything is configured ?
Also, when the laptops are in the 100Mb ports and pinging each other the ping time=3ms (this doesn’t vary, it is a constant 3ms) but when they are both in the Gig ports the ping time=1ms (again, doesn’t vary, always =1ms) and when I connect the switch to my lan and ping it the ping time<1ms (this also does’t vary and it is the speed I expect) so why does it take 3ms for anything to cross the 100Mb switch ports and 1ms to cross between gig ports ? Shouldn’t I expect <1ms ?
The default bridge “bridge local” doesn’t appear to actually bridge anything nor does it show any traffic even when one laptop is in a gig port and the other is in a 100mb port. For some reason I was under the impression that the master port on the 100mb switch had to bridged to a port on the Gig switch in order to pass traffic between them. This does not appear to be the case however so I’m not sure what the function of the “bridge local” is.
Thanks in advance for any help on this.