Mastodawn

Attie Grande Jan 10, 2025

Argh... TracketPacer's attempt to get a hub to produce a broadcast storm by putting a loop between two ports has thoroughly nerd sniped me, and I don't have a hub to test it out (anymore).

... hubs can't produce a "broadcast storm", but they can produce a single / infinite _collisions_, right?

In her case, the specific hub model had a feature to partition the looped ports due to "excessive collisions or jabber conditions".

But even a dumb hub without that wouldn't cause a broadcast storm(?)

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Attie Grande Jan 10, 2025

See also "collision domain".

My understanding of the term "broadcast storm" involves retransmission of an entire frame, which requires that frame to be held somewhere - for example within a switch that uses store-and-forward. 🤔

I'd wager that even a switch with cut-through switching would be able to fall back on store-and-forward for situations when a port is already busy.

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tomkeddie

@attie
I've caused a broadcast storm by accidentally looping ports on a switch. The sent broadcast packets are seen as new packets on the connected port and rebroadcast. Eventually all the bandwidth is consumed with rebroadcast packets. This is likely only one type of broadcast storm but is unfortunately, a common scenario.