Getting Started: MikroTik Bridge Configuration

hey everybody thenatricberg here hope you've been doing well in this video we'll be discussing bridges on mikrotik routers so this is a topic that a few people have asked about and it is something that is needed in the mtcna so we'll be visiting on how to configure bridges on my critique routers as well as what it will look like once we've done the configuration once again i'd like to remind you to subscribe to the channel if you like this content like the video share it and yeah i'll catch in the video just now all right so let's jump into the overview of what a bridge is so in theory a bridge is just something that allows you to extend your network between different ports so let's just grab this mikrotik router and as an example each port on a router by default is its own broadcast domain each port can have like 4096 vlans per port but what a bridge allows us to do is effectively link two or more different interfaces together to form what what we call the bridge where packets would it it won't just be about practice because then effectively what happens is the ports would work like um like a switch so if we bridge these two ports together for example these ports would forward packets if or frames as if they were on a switch and this would become one broadcast domain where each of the other three ports might still be their own broadcast domain now there's very different niche uses you could use for a bridge but mainly it is just to extend your broadcast domain to a different area what you might see people do is they might take a server that's sitting in the server room and it's very close to the the router however the switch is maybe too far away from the router or maybe the switch is full of ports and you need to make a plan immediately to get this thing on the network you could maybe take an open port on the mecritic router and bridge that with the interface where your switch is connecting to and that way your server and your network could communicate directly as if they were all connected on a switch you'd also maybe see this a lot on a provider network where you'd get multiple routers and the routers would be connected directly to each other instead of on a switch and you might bridge the networks or the interfaces so that the provider routers can all be on the same network for things like ospf or whatever other igp you might be using just to make it easier for configuration you don't want all of these interfaces to have their own like a slash 30 ip address you want maybe let's add another router to this picture and say we have a slash 29 network and all three of the routers needs to be in the same domain but there's no switch to connect the routers to so we're actually going to use this as the configuration and i'll guide you through how to set up a bridge now on winbox and on the cli also for reference i'll be adding the the toc document for bridges it's like think of it as a wiki page on my tick on how bridges work and all of the information is on there as well but it is pretty straightforward um when you want to create a bridge i'm just doing this to show you how the bridge is going to work and for people that might struggle to understand what bridges do so let's grab a router image oh i misclicked that let's grab an image for a router see rather blue oh i don't know why my finger keeps missing all right we're good i don't want it to run version 7 though so let's just save this and now we've got another mikrotik router on this topology i'm going to just connect this so long to the other two micro ticks that we have from our previous labs that we set up so see these three micro ticks are now connecting directly together instead of connecting to a switch so for me personally it would be better to connect them onto a switch and maybe then run stuff like lacp to a switch but you can do this this is also a valid way on how to connect some provider routers if you need to and it will work so what we want to do in essence is on our picture you've got ethernet 3 and ethernet 4 of our primary router that we've been working on connecting to the other two routers so there's two uplinks effectively going to each router but we want to now bridge these up links together so that they basically form one network so that they can communicate on layer three on the same broadcast domain that they no need to have an ip address assigned between these two routers and an ip address assigned between these routers and an ip address between these routers they're all going to be in that slash 29 network that we're going to define so let's just define it quickly on our primary microtic quickly let's just jump onto inbox and to configure bridges first thing you're going to do is you're going to click on bridge it might be a bit small i can't zoom it in unfortunately but it is bridge and then from bridge you just make sure you're on the bridge tab then you can click on the plus sign and then here by general you can make this you can give it a name so let's call it bridge to routers and all the other details we can leave blank the the important thing here is to give it a name when you click on apply you'll see a few other details pop up automatically like our mtu will get assigned and we'll get a mac address that is given on the bridge so that is also another important thing to take note of is when packets are being forwarded or frames are being forwarded it will use the bridge's mac address instead of the interface the physical interfaces on the device so it will now use the bridge mac address not just the physical interface mac address we can leave all of these other details blank one thing that i do want to point out we're going to go to the stp it is good to leave it on the rstp just by default if it's just a very basic bridge but there are other things for stp that you might want to configure later on so just keep that in mind http is a thing and it's very useful in in the networking world and in the mtcre stuff that we're going to do i'll dive more into stp but just be aware of this you can leave it as is we're not going to do anything else we can just actually click apply and our bridge is created now the next thing that we need to do is we need to assign the ports to the bridge so we're going to be looking at the ports that we have on our main mikritic router which is ethernet 3 and ethernet four so we're going to assign these two ports to that bridge to do that just click on the plus find your interface so we said three and then we need to find the port or the bridge so let's say it's bridge two routers let's apply and then let's click another plus ethernet for and assign it to the same bridge so all of these other settings we're just going to leave as is this is just a very basic bridge so don't worry about it until we get into the mtc or e stuff okay cool so we've effectively created a bridge now but the bridge isn't going to be doing anything because we haven't assigned any ip address to it yet so let's assign an ip let's go into our ip addresses click on the plus and let's assign 10.0.0.1 to our primary microtech the first one now your interface you can actually set this to your bridge to micro ticks or bridge to routers so that is the bridge that we created we hit apply and now we've assigned an ip address to the bridge now we need to do the same stuff on the other two microarraytic routers so i'm just quickly going to hop onto the other two micro ticks through the cli and just quickly configure this so to do that we'll just say interface bridge add give it a name and the name is going to be bridge to routers i can verify that the bridge is configured by just typing interface bridge print let's just do detail so it will give us the name you can see the mtu set to auto there's the mac address that was generated there's the stp mode everything looks good now we need to assign our ports just as we did through winbox so this is going to be ether1 and e32 so we're just going to type interface port add the interface is going to be ether1 and the bridge is going to be bridge to routers i am going to hit enter and then i'm just going to hit the up arrow so that i can quickly just change this to e32 hit enter now both of those interfaces are added to the bridge just like we did on boxes just through the command line now now we just want to add an ip address so ip address add our address will be 10.0.0. let's make this 1.2 29 and the interface is going to be bridge 2 routers hit enter now in theory i should already have ip communications between these two micro ticks so let's quickly test that we can type in ping 10.0.0.1 and i'm getting a response if i look at my neighbors i can see all the macro ticks because the layer 2 is up but i just want to see if i can pick up that ip address and yes so i'm actually seeing it's fine so i'm not seeing the actual bridge ip here but i am picking up the neighbor so that's fine but it is on that mac address so it's not wrong so let's jump onto our third micro tick and do the same thing all right so interface bridge add name bridge to routers interface bridge ports add interface and that is ether1 and ether4 so ether 1 and the bridges bridge to routers and then ether four and let's add an ip address ip address add address 10.0.0.3 24 and this will be on our bridge to routers interface so from this migrative router i actually expect that i should have ipcommunications2.1 which should be the micro tick just to the left the primary and i should have ip communications to which is good which is right so i just want to do a test we are now on this third mikrotik router and in theory if we're going to connect to it it should go over ether1 to ether2 so what happens if we turn off this port now let's just suspend this link so in theory that the link has gone down can we still get to 0.2 yes we can still get 2.2 reason being with the bridge we've also actually created redundancy where if one of the links goes down the other link is taking over and that's where the stp part of stuff comes in but basically now the frames will be sent out of e54 to this router and then from this router it's being switched it's not actually being routed it's being switched to our other 0.2 micro tick so we've created a very basic bridge but it does the job and it's extended the network nicely the way we want to so if we configured other protocols on top of this like ospf it will work very well so that wraps up the discussion regarding bridges i know it was a base overview but it should give you a good idea on how to configure a very basic bridge between devices something to take out of this bridges can be applied to almost anything so your physical interfaces you can bridge them your vlans can also be bridged even your wlan interfaces can be bridged with physical interfaces and you can extend your network in so many different ways so it's really not just um what we've discussed it was almost the tip of the iceberg and there is so much more for you to learn regarding bridges so again i encourage you to go to the mikrotik toc page regarding bridges and also i highly encourage getting an emulator get even g community edition install it and you could do labs exactly like i'm doing here right now or get gns3 if you feel more comfortable with that and get hands-on experience it really helps and you will become a better network engineer for it so again i'd like to thank you for watching and i'll catch you in the next video see ya

Channel: The Network Berg

Views: 12,460

Keywords: #MirkoTik, #MTCNA, #MTCRE, #MTCINE, #Router, #Routers, #Bridge, #Bridges, #Networking

Id: s5am82iw2vM

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 18 2020