So earlier this year I bought an RB4011 and so far its been a really solid router. I'm still trying to figure somethings with it out though and was hoping maybe the community here could provide me some guidance or insight - apologies for a long post and if I'm sorry if some of this seems really basic; just trying to wrap my head around it and learn. This past weekend I decided to start experimenting with bonding to try and teach myself a bit about link aggregation and even more-so how mikrotik/routerboard os handles it. I ran into some issues that hopefully some people can help explain:
Bonding:
I followed the wiki article on bonding and was only able to finally get the bonds to be able to get internet connection after adding the bond under the default config's bridge as a port. This seems off to me from some of the tutorials and reading the wiki since there doesn't seem to be any mention of having to do that portion of it, is this expected behavior? If it is; is it best practice to put each bond in its own bridge or is it fine to keep them all under the same bridge?
Multiple Bonds on the RB4011
I got a little carried away and created a bond for my WAN and one for my homelab; I wanted to setup a third bond but ran into two issues:
- When I was monitoring the slaves, only one slave appeared to be active (I was using ether 6,7,8), I don't know if this is expected behavior when the system is not under strain using 802.3 but it didn't seem right
- After getting it setup the same way that I did the first two bonds (WAN and my Homelab); the third bond going to my switch (TP-Link SG1024DE) only had two of the 12 devices showing up under DHCP Leases. Those two devices (Linux Mint & Windows 10 computers) were also the only two devices able to reach the internet. Next weekend I might retry to build this bond to see if I just messed something up. This experience in itself gave me three questions:
1) Is there an easy way to just pull the config of a specific section in routeros? ex. If I want to just see the configs of just the Interfaces to compare them, is there an easy way just to pull those?
2) The switch is a managed switch but its only option for LAG is what TP-Link calls legacy LAG. Again, I'm pretty new to bonds but I was under the impression a lag describes the overall bond and LACP is the protocol that makes the lag what it is. Am I wrong in this? And if I am wrong, then any clue how to make an RB4011 work nicely with TP-Links legacy lag mode?
3) I'm still learning some of the tools in routeros but didn't seem to see one that helped me diagnose where the failure was between the bond and the devices. Any recommendations on what I could use that might help me figure out if its a DHCP Server config issue, issue with the Bond, IP pool, etc?
So my first attempt at configuring things was to create a bond and then setup a vlan under the bond (I did this through interfaces, not under bridge - I haven't gotten to the part in the wiki that really explains when its appropriate to setup a vlan under one or the other), with the idea that I might setup 9 vlans on the one bond. But I couldn't for the life of me get the devices to show up in the one vlan let alone bother with the others. Is there a trick to getting VLANs to behave in bonds? It seemed like devices would only appear under the bond but not default to the vlan itself.
I'm sure any guidance or insight will give me more than enough to chew on and I appreciate any help that can be provided to steer me in the direction of further reading/research. Sorry again for the long post. Thank you.