Their wiki is very good, but it really does require a good working knowledge of network systems. The reason I like them is the power and flexibility they offer and the fact the bare minimum is hidden away from you. Once you know what you're doing, you can get one set up just as quickly as any other. Like Cris says, you could pretty much copy and paste what I've posted up there into a terminal window and get a router that was fresh out of the box working in seconds.


This is really about the difference between Ethernet ports and network interfaces.

On a device like the RB750, it has five ethernet ports and a switch chip. The ports can be used in a combination of ways with this switch chip. You can use each Ethernet port as an individual network interface (ie. you had a bunch of separate networks that you wanted to connect together and 'route' traffic in-between). In which case you have a network interface bound to each Ethernet port and not use the switch chip. You'd then need routes in your routing table to pass traffic between the physical ports.

Or you could have 4 of the ports act like a switch and leave one port to act as the WAN port. This means you have 5 physical ports and 2 network interfaces. One interface is bound to the WAN port, and the other interface is bound to the switch chip which has the 4 other ports bound to it. Traffic will pass between the 4 other ports, but like the first example, you need stuff in your routing table to get stuff to go over the WAN port.

So, you set Ether2 to be the switch 'Master' and then for each other port you want to be on the switch, you set that as a slave and point it to the 'Master' interface. You then set things like addresses for routing purposes on the 'Master' interface. From memory you have one switch per box.