Mikrotik as Managed Switch & Router. How !?

Networking & Firewalls
1

Hello,

My network is build around a pfSense router and a Mikrotik CRS317 10G router/switch. The CRS317 is normally only used as 10G-managed switch connecting multiple devices and trunks using vlan’s.

Recently I thought what if I have a temporally problem with pfSense? Why not using the CRS317 as router for most important vlans?

So I defined a PPPoE interface on the CRS and defined new PCLAN and a GUEST-LAN vlans on the CRS using the interface menu.

Than I assigned address ranges and dhcp-servers to those vlans. I also added those vlans in the trunk between the CRS and pfSense.

Now there is “managed switch part” of the CRS with all the vlans connecting the interfaces and new next to that there vlans originated and routed by CRS it self.

And that is about where the big trouble starts :hot_face:

  • The original vlans in the “managed switch part” are simply created bij adding the vlans to the related vlan bridge menu.
  • so the original assumption was, I add the newly created vlans to the managed switch bridge and bind them to the interfaces just as I did before.

Not so :thinking: :thinking:

In fact despite of thinking and trying for days, I did not manage to tie the new vlans to the “managed switch”.

I tried to ping from the crs-internal-ping-tool towards what was intended the equivalent of a pfSense vlan-interface, tried to ping from a pc, etc etc just nothing worked. It is probably me being stupid …

So I need help and hope some one knows how to fix this :slightly_smiling_face:

2

In the bridge vlan menu there should be an option when you add ports that lists the bridge itself. This is an internal port, the link to the CPU. You have to tag VLANs here for them to get between the switch chip and the CPU (which you can think of as the router). This is explained a few times here. Bridge VLAN Table - RouterOS - MikroTik Documentation

Then in the Interfaces > VLAN entry, for the parent interface you select the bridge as well.