Port groups come under the Interface category in the top-level icons. Under the section headed "Port grouping and naming", you will see the list of existing port groups - port group objects (port) are top-level objects. An Add link will also be present if it is possible to add extra groups.

Each group is given a user-defined name, which is used to refer to the group in any interface definitions.

To create a new group, click on the Add link to take you to a simple page where you specify the name of the group, and select one or more physical ports to belong to the group. To select more than one physical port, hold down the Ctrl key whilst clicking on a port number to toggle it between selected and unselected. An optional comment can also be specified for the group, which may be useful to act as a memory jogger for the purpose of the port group.

Editing an existing group works similarly - click the Edit link next to the group you want to modify.

Certain USB devices (eg 4G dongles and USB ethernet adapters) present themselves as virtual ethernet ports. A port group can be defined to refer to a USB device rather than a set of physical ports by selecting a USB dongle configuration object for the dongle attribute. Note that a USB dongle cannot be combined with physical ports in a port group definition.

The example XML below shows three port groups :-

<config ...>
...
 <port name="WAN"
       ports="1"/>
 <port name="ADMIN"
       ports="2"/>
 <port name="LAN"
       ports="3 4"/>
...
</config>

In this example, "WAN" and "ADMIN" groups consists of a single port each, physical ports 1 and 2 respectively. The "LAN" group consists of two physical ports, numbers 3 and 4. Ports 3 and 4 are members of a single layer 2 broadcast domain, and are equivalent in function in terms of communication between the FB2700 and another device.