Dear All ..
I have a board with multi port GBE that come with “LAN By Pass” modes via a jumper.
The controller is Intel
I already installed RouterOS on this board .. and all interface displayed correctly.
My question : Is RouterOS support for “LAN By Pass” Mode ?
Sincerely
-bino-
Isn’t that like a hardware feature?
The bypass feature can be controlled by software, or by a watchdog timer configurable for 1-63 second operation, according to the company.
Our Carrier-Class PowerRouters have two ports with lan by-pass in them!
But the by-pass-functionality will probably not be enabled or controlled by software.
What MIGHT work is that the by-pass mode is active when the unit is physically switched off (no power).
But what would be nice (and I have asked MikroTik for this probably years ago) would be using the watchdog feature of those cards. I.e. IF RouterOS should ever hang and NOT reboot itself (which happens rarely, but happens) the network interfaces would be switched to bypass.
Hanging is a different beast and I don’t think that any card etc, supports this.
In our units, its purly a hardware function. While power is supplied to the board a relay, or the likes, keeps the two ports open. I.e. unconnected. During a power failure, or other power loss, the relay would loose power, causing the ports to switch closed. Hence, then they are connected.
All cards I have in the shelf here do provide the ability to operate in “software-watchdog” mode:
I.e. you configure them for startup, they go to “non-bypass-mode”. The stay in that mode as long as the wathcdog trigger software does give the card a “I’m still alive” signal every few seconds (configurable). If this heartbeat is not getting to the card anymore (kernel panic, for example), the card will go to bypass mode automatically.
its would be an awesome feature with to work with some border mikrotiks that act as a traffic shaper like a (man in the middle betwen , Upstream provider and the border / core switch or router)
How does that work when they loose power?
our toplayer box does this. basically a relay that just drops all 8 pins to 8 pins on the rj45. It should be able to deactivate that relay based on watchdog or power loss.
Like I said, the PowerRouter 732 does this without issues, it is a hardware feature, not software. So if power loss does occur, it does directly connect the pins. On the PCI cards, that offer this “software watchdog”, thats great, but what happens if it looses power..
Dennis,
of course those PCI cards do THE SAME when power is lost - the activate the by-pass. It’s just an ADDITIONAL feature to activate the by-pass if power is still there but the watchdog “ping” from the software is lost…