I was having compatibility issues with some NICs on my desktop and wanted to be able to quickly test them without rebooting. PCIe hotplug can be a pain to get working on hardware that doesn’t natively support it – there are a couple of good blog posts from a different Matt that you should read (part 1, part 2). Those blog posts focus on getting Thunderbolt working on a machine that doesn’t natively support it, but a lot of it is still relevant here, and Thunderbolt will actually come into the picture here in a roundabout way. I will warn you that there are caveats here, but read on if you want to see how to do this.

RouterOS 7.17 added a very nice manageability feature which is the ability to use interface lists in Bridge VLAN definitions. Between this and automatic entries based on PVIDs, you can greatly simplify configurations from the pre-7.17 world.