How to add WAN access IP on a Negear GS108Tv3 switch?

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Thanks to the advice on a previous thread I bought a cheap used Negear GS108Tv3 8 port switch on ebay.
I did install the openwrt-22.03.0-realtek-rtl838x-netgear_gs108t-v3-initramfs-kernel.bin image and am able to access the switch via ssh and LUCI.

But to be able to wget further images for sysupgrade I needed to be able to access the internet via my upstream WAN gateway.

So I simply removed switch port8 from the switch grouping and used that as a WAN port, as you might typically see on a 'normal' router.

However this is not an ideal solution for general day to day use as it leaves only 7 ports in the switch GREEN bridge.

How can I add a WAN access IP to the switch (e.g. 192.168.178.2) while leaving all 8 switch ports usable by the GREEN LAN switch (e.g. 192.168.128.1) ?

I can easily plug in the WAN cable if internet access is needed occasionally, but I would prefer not to have to substantially reconfigure the networking setup each time!

I thought that creating a software device would be the obvious way to proceed, as they can be enabled / disabled with a mouse click.
So I tried creating a MAC VLAN but could not get that to work.

How would people recommend that I should proceed?

2

The conventional approach would not be to add a wan interface to a switch, but just to configure its lan (management interface) correctly, including gateway and dns (or using dhcp-client to let it do that for you), that way it can access the internet connectivity of your lan (provided by your router) just like any other client.

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