Using switch chip for managing vlans ?

RouterOS General
1

Hi I’m looking into using the switch chip on a pair of RB750G’s to vlan segment my network at L2 - Or in other words I dont need the router to do inter-vlan routing.

I can create the vlans under the switch just fine:

[admin@MikroTik] /interface ethernet switch vlan> print
Flags: X - disabled, I - invalid 
 #   SWITCH                                                           VLAN-ID PORTS                                                          
 0   switch1                                                          12      ether5-local-slave                                             
                                                                              ether4-local-slave                                             
 1   switch1                                                          10      ether5-local-slave                                             
                                                                              ether4-local-slave                                             
                                                                              ether3-local-slave                                             
[admin@MikroTik] /interface ethernet switch vlan> export
# jan/02/1970 03:11:00 by RouterOS 4.11
# software id = PMKU-BM7M
#
/interface ethernet switch vlan
add disabled=no ports=ether5-local-slave,ether4-local-slave switch=switch1 vlan-id=12
add disabled=no ports=ether5-local-slave,ether4-local-slave,ether3-local-slave switch=switch1 vlan-id=10

This works - packets tagged with vlan 10 arriving on eth4 can reach a node on vlan 10 connected to eth5.

What I’d like to add is port eth3 which should tag all incomming frames with vlan10 and remove any vlan header on outgoing frames - I believe this should be possible using the switch Rules but I cant for the life of me get it to work.

Can anybody help me in the right direction ?

2

Did you try to put New Vlan ID = “0” in the rule ?

According to what i’ve seen inside the switch rules, there is no possibility to remove a vlan Tag.


You can eventually change the vlan tag.


So i think you’ll need an external manageable switch to do this. Or use a software bridge (about 5 times slower).


Routerboards are not switches, or yes they are, but with a limited function set. If you need a full set of switching level 2 functions, buy a smart switch. If you need basic routing of vlans, + dhcp snooping and other safety measures, buy a level 2+ or level 3 switch. And if you need advanced level 4 switching buy a level 4 switch, or a Session Border Controler.

The switch inside routerboards are hardware chips, they can’t be upgraded with new functions.

3

Yeah I tried with vlan 0 - didn’t work.

I agree with your statement above - I am however not trying to do anything unsupported as far as I call tell, check out the documentation on the switch chip - it’s actually very feature rich and does a number of things besides packet switching - all at wire speed.

I’m thinking it should be possible to do anything the RB250GS can.