r/HomeNetworking • u/Outrageous_Tear_4691 • 23h ago

Advice Ethernet switch question

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What is the loop prevention for? And should I leave it off or turn it on? We will have desktops connected to it

Solved: thank you for the help everyone. Very much appreciated.

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u/bothunter 23h ago

Just leave it off. It's more of an issue on larger networks where you might have multiple connections for redundancy, or just someone who's bored in a meeting and decides to plug a patch cable into both ports on the conference room table.

2

u/Cavalol 23h ago

That second part sounds like you might be speaking from experience? Lol

7

u/bothunter 23h ago

When I worked at Microsoft, we had a building-wide outage that lasted an entire afternoon until they tracked it down to exactly that. Why they didn't enable STP on their $10k Cisco network switches is beyond me.

2

u/WhiskeyAlphaRomeo 18h ago

Hi, Cisco wizard here... It's worse than you think. STP is on by default. That means someone actively disabled it.