I notice that some things are different. The first port is now named combo1. I normally set it up so that port 1 is the wan1, port 2 is the wan2, and ports 3 & 4 are the lans feeding 2 switches. There is no longer an option to slave port 4 to port 3. How is this now done? Thanks.
Create bridge, add add this two ports to newly created bridge
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Thanks. Does it affect speed or performance at all by creating a bridge?
It seems like performance is affected by creating a bridge. What is the best way to have 2 or 3 ports “bridged” together without much performance loss? Thanks.
Important changes:
No switch-chip - the device now features only fully independent Ethernet ports each with a direct connection to the CPU, allowing to overcome previous shared 1Gbit limitation from switch-chip ports and utilize full potential of CPU processing power on those ports.
https://routerboard.com/CCR1009-7G-1C-PC
Thank you, I know that. I’d like to know if bridging is the only way, and how much it affects performance.
It is the only way. The cpu has enough power to handle bridges like a sweet.
Thanks jarda. I’m not sure what you mean by “it can handle bridges like a sweet”, but I’m assuming you mean there is very little performance loss? Am I correct?
Yes 
Compare previous CCR1009:
Note ether1-4 belong to a switch chip whose CPU lane is 1Gb/s; 4 gigabit ports share a 1Gb/s connection toward the CPU.
On it, briding ether1-4 would be a bottleneck due to the former; their optimal application was to build a “mini switch” by enslaving ether2-4 to ether1, and connect hosts that would be talking not only to the router, but directly between theirselves without traversing the CPU.
Compare vs Actual CCR1009:
All ether ports are now directly connected to the CPU with their own 1Gb/s lanes, so no bottlenecks, and more flexibility.
The limitation has never been the power of the CPU to run bridges, but the 1Gb/s shared lane for ether1-4.
Either router have more than enough power to run bridges in terms of CPU, this is only a concern on lower powered routerboards.
Thank you for the clear response.
Should I use the combo port for the wan, or port 1?
Does it make a difference?
Thanks.
None as far as I know, you may use any of them.
The combo port is intended to be used in a dual copper / fiber run, as it would automatically failover from one to another, typical application: to link a poe switch on top of a tower (HeX POE running sector radios for example) by copper and fiber to the CCR on the tower bottom; this way if there’s interference (FM towers for example), the cable or the fiber gets broken, communication between the CCR and the Tower top switch won’t be cut.
When using a bridge for port 3 and 4, do you reference those ports in the firewall, or just the bridge? How about anywhere else in the router? Do you always reference the bridge?
I use bonding for connecting to the Lan switch, like LACP, try it. If port in bridge, then all references need apply to bridge (address, rules, queues)
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This kind of router is normally used in a network where there already are one or more switches for the local network.
MikroTik has decided to drop the switch from this model to have 2 more direct links to the processor for routing.
Of course this means you don’t have the switching function on port 1-4 anymore. What you would normally do
is connect one port to an external switch and do all switching there. It already was quite unlikely that 4 ports
was enough for switching in a network where the CCR is typically employed.
An advantage of this change is that mistakes in the configuration, like using port 1 for the uplink and ports 2-8
for the internal network, which would cost performance in the original CCR1009, are now no longer possible.
Any port can be used for the uplink now, it does not matter anymore as they are all equal.
Yes, you can use a bridge as a workaround for not having a switch and yes, it may cost some performance.
In practice it will probably not be noticable on this device as it is quite powerful. But I would not put a fast
server on one port and the heavy users on another and connect them via a bridge. Get an external switch, really.
Ok, I get what you are saying. That makes sense. We rarely use more than 2 gigabit switches in the rack. One usually for lan devices, and one for ip video distribution. How about if we connect the router directly to the lan switch, and then connect the video distribution switch to a port on the lan switch? This only uses one port on the mikrotik, and both switches are connected. Does this sound better than bridging? Thanks.
Are both switchs on the same lan/segment or are they using different ip. If they on different segment use different port .
They are on the same lan segment.
Yes, connect all LAN switches together (using the highest speed port) and to the MikroTik on a single port. Does not matter which one.
Alternatively you could split the network in two routed networks and connect each to a different port.
You mentioned the highest speed port. All ports are gigabit, so would it make a difference?
In that case, there is no difference.
But some switches have a lot of “slower” ports and 2 separate ports for uplink that are faster.
Or they have a special “stacking” connector to connect multiple switches together.
When this is not the case for your switches, you can just use a random port to connect them.