Hi all.
Is it possible to configure routerboard with 5 ethernet port to be a switch and router all in one? Say 4 ports configure as switch and one as Wan link? It will be good small router for home or small buisness.
Yes, you can do it.
Just create an bridge(rstp), add the ethernet ports and ready!.
Switch layer 2/3
Thank you a lot.
It is also possible to use bridge chip functionality on RB150, RB192, RB153 and use several ports as one - this way traffic is not going trough the CPU - so even on RB100 you can get 100Mbps full duplex without any problems.
Wow.
Can you give more detailes? How could I get this result?
I would also be interested in this. Sometimes I have need for a decent ethernet switch that is POE powered. If it could be used in switch mode at wire-speed that would be fantastic. I remember this being talked about in the the forum about a year ago and it wasn’t available at the time.
It’s really easy.. Lets say you have a RB153 and you want to make ports 3,4, and 5 into a switch. Open interfaces, double click on ether4 and set the master port to ether3 and click OK, then double click on ether5 and set the master port to ether3 also.
That will switch together ports 3,4 and 5. Just remember you will loose the ability to set ip’s or anything with ports 4 and 5. You will have to set them on the master port(port 3 in this example)..
Hope that makes sense..
-Gerard
Very nice. I will try it out.
Eric
I tried to use this method in order to save running one extra dumb switch for IP phones. I created bridge group on additional 5 ethernet port card on RB532A - i used 3 of them - one for connection to VDSL modem/switch and two for 2 phones. Phones were unable to get data from DHCP server which worked fine either directly or via dumb switch. Because of that I had to ditch this idea for now and just use extra switch. I used MT OS 2.9.50 if I remember correctly.
I am trying to do something similar: use an RB153 to aggregate four DSLs, preferably with some sort of load-balancing and fail-over capability. Each DSL may be from a different ISP, with either a static configuration or DHCP, etc.:
_____ DSL1 _____
| | \ | |
DSL2 --->1| 1 | `->1| X |
DSL3 --->2| 5 | | c |---> LAN
DSL4 --->3| 3 | | o |
DSL5 --->4| |5---->2| m |
|_____| |_____|
We currently have DSL1 and DSL2 going directly into ports 1 and 2 of a dual-WAN router. We want to continue to use the router for port-forwarding, so the idea is to plug DSL2 and three other lines into the RB153, and direct its output to port 2 of the dual-WAN router, as pictured above.
I thought it might be as easy as Bonding the DSL interfaces, and then Bridging that to the LAN interface. Things are rarely as easy as they look. 
But am I on the right track? What am I missing?
I’m new to MT so I haven’t quite firgured out how to do both load balancing AND failover. I’d like to know how to do both. But load balancing is fairly easy. Just add each gateway into the MT.
/ip route add gateway=DSL2,DSL3,DSL4,DSL5
If one of the DSL has twice the bandwidth, put it in twice.
Take a look at the Static Equal Cost Multi-Path routing and Standard Policy-Based Routing with Failover at http://www.mikrotik.com/testdocs/ros/3.0/ip/route.php
Just noticed you had DHCP too. I don’t how this would affect it.
Good luck,
Cory
I just did some testing because I was curious about this…
Minirouter 5-port
TEST 1 (bridge mode)
from eth1 to eth5 lan test via two computers through the router with v3.6
port 1 and 5 bridged
tcp throughput standard settings just about 43MB max.
TEST 2 (switch mode)
same test with eth 5 set to master port eth1 (thus enabling switch mode)
tcp max throughput was about 80MB I think - it was significantly more and the cpu was bypassed for the most part - wasn’t busy at max throughput.
Problem I could not overcome…
Prior to running tests above I added IP address to eth1
in bridge mode I could ping the ip address of eth1
in switch mode I could not talk via IP to either eth1 or eth5 no matter what I tried.
This would lead me to believe that I could use this as a managed switch but I lose all routing / ip abilities on any ports in “switch mode”
What would be extremely useful would be to have this configurable as say a standard router from the store in switch mode for higher throughput. 1 port was wan IP other 4 in switch mode with internal dhcp and lan ip configs for client devices. Is this possible? A $30 router from the store has less performance hardware but it can do this? Is there no way to achieve this, am I missing something? It simply may not be possible due to the implementation here but I wanted to ask…
Scott
I think that is exactly what Gerard was describing. The port 3 is the master, being the lan side interface, and the ports one and two could be wan/dmz or wan1/wan2.
I tried to test it like this - did not work for me.
Scott
This is exactly what I want to do with a RB192, great post!
If I understand correctly the RB192 has 2 switch chipsets, one for ports 1-5 and the other for 6-9. I can successfully configure ether2 as master with slaves 3,4,5 and ether6 as master with slaves 7,8,9. ether1 is a DHCP client to my office switch and gets an IP for internet access. My output on /interface ethernet print shows that Switch 0 contains ports 1,2,3,4,5 and Switch 1 is 6,7,8,9. Ok thats all good so far…
But the problem is getting both of these switches to route out ether1 to the internet. One of the switches has access to the internet, but the other only distributes IP’s via DHCP. I think I’m confused on how to even configure this properly.
So far I have 2 pools (pool1,pool2), 2 DHCP servers (one for pool1, other for pool2), an IP address on ether2 (192.168.1.1) and ether6 (192.168.1.2). The ether6 switch cannot get out ether1, but the ether2 switch can, so I tried putting ether2 and ether6 together as a bridge with no luck.
I’m lost.
This entire topic is useless except as the subject implies you can use ports of some rbs as switch ports that do indeed operate faster than when just regularly bridged. Once you set a master port on the rb and put certain ports into switch mode you —> can not <— add an ip to them or otherwise use them in any routing type function. I may be wrong, but I tested this myself and was unable to do so. If someone has done this successfully then raise your hand.
Until then - yeah its a great concept, but only wishful thinking.
Scott
I’ve tried it today with RB150 and may say it really works. 1st port I configure as wan, 2nd as local with ip address. Set DHCP, DNS, firewall rules etc. to be able to serve clients on port 2. Then set the master port on ports 3, 4, 5 as mr. Gerard said. And I’ve got switch on ports 2-5, from wich I can browse internet, connect to ip address of port 2 to configure RB. Also I’ve tried to copy files between two computers connected to ports 2 and 3 and works without load on CPU.
Thank you mr. Gerard for sharing this infos.
Glad it works, I’ll have to try it again with another rb and the latest os.
Scott
Is this still possible with 3.15? I am trying to find how to do it, but can not locate the option for master interface.
Thanks in advance
what model of routerboard do you have? this is not available in all boards, only the ones with bridge chip