Hi @Bongo,

Bongo wrote 

Thanks for the detailed reply, I have read some of your other posts in the this forum, and you are a real asset to the forum.

thanks for the compliment, but so are you, too; read on. ;-)

Since you have an ER-X and the EP-R6 (which is essentially an outdoor version of the ER-X SFP), you can try this on either one, since they are both based on the MediaTek MT7621A SoC, which has a 32bit MIPS CPU and a dedicated portion that is an switch chip.  I use fw v1.10.10 because v2.0.6 has problems on the MediaTek SoC based routers.

The post at »Kazoo It« was the missing link I searched the UBNT forum many times w/o finding the definitive answer. You're right, the switch is indeed a HW switch. Could have seen this in the Config Tree by the separate sections for the individual Ethernet ports and the switch SoC, what made me scratch my head why Vyatta OS does it this way. :-)

Thanks very much for the link to the blog post at »Kazoo It«, it's really very helpful!

So, it's indeed possible to set the PVID independently from VLAN membership of the ports and a user's claim in their forum that setting a PVID would make the switch port an access port is wrong, isn't it? But still an user says so (see here). Anyway, I consider to go with OpenWRT on the EP-R6 for use as the gateway for Pharos and Omada Outdoor APs with Multi-SSID setups. I currently use the EP-R6 as a plain switch connected to a gateway router running an OpenWRT-based hotspot portal and I would like to have this functionality in only one device.

I also still use v1.10.10 b/c of the problems of v2.0.6 with the MediaTek SoC. My setups are WAN1/WAN2 ↔ LAN using three IPs for the ER-X and one VLAN-aware LAN only for the EP-R6 using one IP for mgmt assigned to switch0.2. This outdoor switch feeds a Pharos CPE510 and an EAP225-Outdoor. Former setup on the ER-X will be changed soon to a WAN ↔ LAN setup with five public IPs and five VLANs over a trunk. Good to know that packet switching throughput is limited to 500 Mbps full-duplex (1 Gbps total) between WAN and LAN. That's still good enough for my use case in a standard WAN/LAN setup, but definitely could be improved by UBNT for the ER-X if possible technically.

Probably that's a simliar product policy like TP-Link's policy for Easy Smart and Smart switches.

Bongo wrote

What is less clear,  is what happens when a switch-port has a vid or multiple vids associated with it, but does not have a pvid.  It seems like it gets forwarded to the switch0 interface, which isn't really associated with any vlan on the switch.  But then it can't be forwarded to other switch-ports.  That's what the EdgeRouter X Inter-VLAN routing issues (How I solved it) thread is all about.

Yes, I know this – that's exactly the setup on my outdoor switch setup of EP-R6 which doesn't need Inter-VLAN routing. But the gatewy router (ER-X) would need Inter-VLAN routing. In my opinion, the behavior of forwarding tagged frames to the base interface (switch0 here) is the same semantics as with Linux kernel VLANs: the base interface gets all frames, no matter whether tagged or untagged.

A port without a PVID is IMO a clear violation of the 802.1Q standard which states that every switch port needs to be a member of at least one VLAN, the so-called Primary VLAN (which is always the VLAN defined by the Primary VLAN ID, hence its name PVID).

The standard doesn't even mention terms like »access port«, »trunk port«, »general port« nor »Default/Native/System VLAN«; it only talks of »a port which can be member of one or more VLANs«, where all but the primary VLAN are optional. A PVID not only defines what to do with tagging untagged frames on ingress or untagging tagged frames on egress, it much more designates the port to a specific VLAN membership, so every port is always in one VLAN at least.

This leaves much freedom to vendors for an actual implementation of the 802.1Q standard, but omitting a PVID isn't part of that freedom.

Ben Pin has good youtube videos.

 

Since this stuff isn't well documented by Ubiquiti, you have to spend a lot of time reading the forums and searching the web.  Vyatta/vyos documentation also helps.

Problem with non-native English speaking people such as me is that videos are most often very difficult to follow. That's why I like written documentation, preferably by the vendor of the device. But nowadays vendors tend to not document much aside from the usual »click here to do that« – I would have guessed so even w/o such kind of »documentation« :-)

You know, if you start searching the web you often end up having 40+ tabs open in your browser and still no definitive answer, but five different answers and seven opinions to choose from where nine are actually outdated since firmware did change meanwhile. :-D

What's left as the ultimate documentation is to read the source code – if it's available at all.

@Bongo, sorry for the confusion. Yes, it's Port VLAN ID in the standard and every port needs to be in one VLAN at least.

It's a pitty you want to leave the forum. It has been a valuable discussion with your profound knowledge about ER-X; thank you for the information, too.