Cool Feature on my TP-Link Switch

[Gerowen]

This isn't really a help request, just some anecdotes and thoughts.

So I don't remember if I posted here about it or not when it happened, but I made a short YouTube video some time back when I discovered that if you have the Steam Deck docked to its official dock with a wired ethernet connection, and you un-dock it, there's some kind of bug where I guess if there's a network transaction of some kind going on at the moment you undock it, there is a chance that it can trigger a sort of broadcast storm.  I noticed because after an hour or two I got an email from Uptime Robot telling me my Nextcloud was down and after a few hours it had essentailly DoS'd my router until I unplugged the ethernet cable from the Steam Deck dock.  It has happened twice now several months apart.

Anyway, I recently upgraded the little 5 port Linksys switch I have in the living room to an 8 port TP-Link one and noticed this little toggle switch on the back to monitor and prevent "loop" problems.  The manual says it makes it monitor network traffic and look for networking loops.  This seems like the kind of thing that should be there by default unless there's a performance hit of some kind.  Anyway, this doesn't seem like what was going on with my Steam Deck since I have no circular connections on my little home network; just one incoming cable from the router and several outgoing to specific devices with none returning.  It's also entirely possible that this loop prevention is built into the Linksys switch without needing a toggle.  However, I saw this and thought it was a neat little thing to mention.  I did also notice that its link lights are considerably dimmer and the manual says it can enter a "low power" mode during times of minimal network traffic to reduce its power draw.  I'm hoping that if it has the option for this "loop prevention", that either that in and of itself will stop these future broadcast storms, or that there are other technologies built into this switch to prevent that sort of thing.  Honestly I can't reliably reproduce the issue so the only way to know is to just use the thing and make a habit of undocking the Deck while a download is running or something and see if it happens again.

After it happened the first time I found some documentation online where apparently it's a known problem with the networking hardware in many USB-C docks like the one that Valve sells for the Deck, and a contributing factor may be that the dock itself, and therefore the network card, stays powered even when the deck has been removed, unless you manually pull the power cord from the dock too.

[+BudMan MVC]

loop prevent or STP (Spanning Tree Protocol), would normally be on by default.  But that looks to be the unmanaged model (the SG108E is their smart model with web interface), ie no interface to control seeing on.  So seems they put a toggle to turn it on or off. 

I have an older model of the 108e

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanning_Tree_Protocol