As Bartoz says, this thread is whole lotta bout nothing.
In MikroTik routers it is even more about nothing than usual.
With the typical home router, the “WAN port” is hardwired in the whole router to be the internet port.
But in RouterOS this is not at all the case. You can use any port as the WAN port, and adapt to hardware circumstances like PoE capabilities, speed, being on a switch, etc etc.
Many other routers do not have that flexibility.
In fact on the CCR1009 at work I have chosen to put a bridge on every functional interface. So I have two bridges for the two internet connections, ether7 is member of one and ether8 of the other.
And also a bridge for the LAN, the guest network, an IoT network, all with only a single ethernet port as member.
All configuration (IP address, routes, firewall rules, queues, etc etc) is applied to the bridge interface, and I can easily move the internet connection to another physical port by just making another port member of that bridge.
With the simple case of a bridge with a single port, it can even use a more efficient bridge mode (fast forward) and I have not detected any performance impact of this change.
However, it makes me a lot more flexible. The type of router (CCR1009-8G-1S-1S+) is no longer available, and when it should die I can get another router with different physical port numbers or layout and I can quickly adapt the configuration to the new situation.
I can also keep a synchronized configuration for for a CHR instance which I can use to quickly recover from hardware issues, which is connected to the network via some tagged VLANs instead of direct connections. Easy to make a “router on a stick” with VLANs and keep the whole configuration the same except for the bridge ports.
The issue isn’t which port is designated as LAN or WAN or Mommy. The REAL issue is the RouterOS making dynamic changes without notice.
I’d honestly be fine with dynamic changes if they were helpful and saved me from myself but not providing ANY notice or failing to update the viewers configuration (CLI, GUI, Web etc.) is IMHO … reckless.
It’s amazing how many engineers think they understand networking when all they did was physically connect a cable and “plug and play” did everything for them. Amazing.
Hey pe1chl
Thanks for providing helpful and useful information. Your flexible environment is what I am attempting to setup. I’m new to MikroTik but years with Cisco and Juniper. In my role I am REQUIRED to understand the ins and outs of technology no mater the vendor; much of my day is spent in RFCs, Tech manuals and Wireshark analysis. Some vendors do a good job with technology and some just don’t. Thanks for sharing.
Frank
But that is not really happening! You may feel that it is, but then it is probably caused by you misunderstanding things, or maybe you have put the router on internet without firewall and without password, so you have invited a fellow admin who is changing things.
There are a few things that may confuse you:
- RouterOS tends to add a DHCP client on the first interface when you have not configured any IP address in a completely reset router (without default config). It will stop doing that when you have configured an IP address somewhere.
- There is a QuickSet feature that changes a lot of things. You should not use it except to quickly set a router for a standard operation mode (e.g. NAT router). You should NEVER touch it after doing other configuration. MikroTik has been requested MANY MANY times to make a feature available to remove or at least disable the quickset, but unfortunately they refuse to do so.
- There are some features to help the clueless, like “Detect Internet”, but they are disabled by default. Do not enable such things unless you know what you are doing.