Switch Management Interface

RouterOS General
1

I have read through and applied the following configuration.

https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Switch_Chip_Features#Management_access_configuration

The issue with my testing is the follow configuration:

  1. our management access is connected to another switch which cannot be configured with MSTP.
  2. we have a connection between two CRS328-4C-20S-4S+RM each of witch have a connection to the management switch

Spanning tree ends up blocking either the connection to the management switch or between the two CRS328 (as you would expect). Although not spelled out in the management access configuration my hope was to remove a port from the bridge and utilize it as a layer 3 interface to connect to the management switch. This will avoid issues with STP, but this management configuration does not appear in the WIKI so my concern is there could be other issues by configuring the device with such a setup. I know I will lose the hardware offload features by removing the port from the bridge but as it is a dedicated management port I can’t see any issues with this.

Thank you in advance.

2

In principle management can be done through any interface which has IP address. In this context one has to remember that bridge is an interface as well. It doesn’t matter what kind of interface that is, can be bridge interface, can be vlan interface … and can be physical ethernet interface. After that firewall filter settings matter (with single IP interface dedicated to management you shouldn’t need firewall) … and MAC server settings (for IP-less winbox connection just in case).
BTW, HW acceleration only matters when two or more ports are in same bridge. If there’s an unique port (as it is in your case) where all traffic has to go to CPU, no HW acceleration could help anyway. And having it a lone member of a bridge doesn’t make much sense either (unless you wan’t to perform some fancy filtering which is only doable by bridge, which would require to disable HW acceleration anyway).