"Network Loops & Storm Control STP State Flapping"

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bslow47

Getting the hang of it
Jan 4, 2022
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Texas
What does "Network Loops & Storm Control STP State Flapping" Mean.

Have a UniFi US8 switch that 1-8 are also PoE ports. I had 1-8 with cameras and an AP and I had another switch coming in. I was going to add another camera and I needed a PoE port. I took the incoming switch off and put that on port 9 which I had to get an
adapter to make it from SFP to RJ45. This worked good for months. One day it quit working. Since I discovered 180 degree view cameras I didn't need port 1 for PoE anymore so I plugged the switch back into port 1 and everything is back to normal. I now have time
to research what went wrong and discovered this warning under port management tab. So can anyone tell me what this means? Is the port or adapter bad?

As always,

I appreciate the feed back.
 
That message would indicate that the switch detected a network loop and shut one of the ports down to stop it.

It is quite possibly not your fault, apparently recent(ish) Unifi firmware has a barely acknowledged bug related to this.






Based on what I read, if you have any machines that are connected to the same network via both wired and wifi at the same time it could be triggering the issue even though that is normally not a problem.
 
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bp2008 said:
That message would indicate that the switch detected a network loop and shut one of the ports down to stop it.

It is quite possibly not your fault, apparently recent(ish) Unifi firmware has a barely acknowledged bug related to this.






Based on what I read, if you have any machines that are connected to the same network via both wired and wifi at the same time it could be triggering the issue even though that is normally not a problem.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your response on my previous post. I just had a similar situation as I previously posted. This time I disconnected the the switch going into port 1 and put it back into the SFT port I put an adapter to accept RJ45 connection.
As mentioned on previous post, I got the error "Network Loops & Storm Control STP State Flapping" but this time I did not get that error. With the link you provided about the firmware 7.1.26 makes perfect sense but, I have the 7.2.123. If that matters.
Any how, since my switches are probably 6+ years old do you think if I replace them with new ones will this resolve my network loop errors?
 
Network loops are just that, a situation where a network is being fed back into itself. It's the equivalent to the squealing sound you get with audio feedback, but in the digital network realm.

Most network switches have a setting called Spanning Tree Protocol (STP or the faster RSTP) that can detect and shut down the offending connection before it overloads the network with data. It's not always turned on by default however. I don't know Ubiquity systems well enough to know if its on by default or not. That being said, it sounds like the switch shut down the offending port, and when you reconnected the device the switch automatically reset the connection (ie it turned it back on again).

Because most devices assign a unique network address to every network port/connection, it's relatively uncommon for the average home network to have this problem. (The unique ip address means the data is managed correctly and there is no feedback loop). If you tried to connect a device to the network multiple times with a shared network address, this is where the problems can start. It is more common to experience when you start connecting switches to other switches (if it's done incorrectly).
 
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bslow47 said:
Thanks for your response on my previous post. I just had a similar situation as I previously posted. This time I disconnected the the switch going into port 1 and put it back into the SFT port I put an adapter to accept RJ45 connection.
As mentioned on previous post, I got the error "Network Loops & Storm Control STP State Flapping" but this time I did not get that error. With the link you provided about the firmware 7.1.26 makes perfect sense but, I have the 7.2.123. If that matters.
Any how, since my switches are probably 6+ years old do you think if I replace them with new ones will this resolve my network loop errors?
Click to expand...
Replacing with new hardware would only solve anything if the issue is coming from a hardware defect in the older switch(es). It is certainly possible, but how likely that is, I could not say.
 
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The Automation Guy said:
Network loops are just that, a situation where a network is being fed back into itself. It's the equivalent to the squealing sound you get with audio feedback, but in the digital network realm.

Most network switches have a setting called Spanning Tree Protocol (STP or the faster RSTP) that can detect and shut down the offending connection before it overloads the network with data. It's not always turned on by default however. I don't know Ubiquity systems well enough to know if its on by default or not. That being said, it sounds like the switch shut down the offending port, and when you reconnected the device the switch automatically reset the connection (ie it turned it back on again).

Because most devices assign a unique network address to every network port/connection, it's relatively uncommon for the average home network to have this problem. (The unique ip address means the data is managed correctly and there is no feedback loop). If you tried to connect a device to the network multiple times with a shared network address, this is where the problems can start. It is more common to experience when you start connecting switches to other switches (if it's done incorrectly).
Click to expand...
Thanks for your reply. This is good information. My question is I had to replace my old Router (Ubiquity) because it died. Before it died the network worked great for 5+ Years. My new Ubiquity router/gateway has been up for a couple of months and seems to be working fine. But, since I added this new router and after a few months is when I started having this problem. Everything is hooked up the way it was with the old router. Since I have a new router could this possibly be a compatibility problem with the older switches? Probably a loaded question but I'm not a IT guy. Thanks
 
I dou
bslow47 said:
Since I have a new router could this possibly be a compatibility problem with the older switches?
Click to expand...
I doubt that is a problem. "Networking" has been pretty standardized from the earliest days honestly. You really shouldn't have any problems mixing devices from different manufactures on the same network. Now it is possible that one manufacturer might have a "default" setting that doesn't play well with another manufacture's default setting, but even those situations are pretty few and far between. There is obviously more room for error the farther you move away from "default" settings however.
 
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