Broadcast on Protocol

[wtm]

What exactly does the "Broadcast on Protocol" option do?

[KBrownConsulting]

My understanding (and seemingly confirmed by brief testing in the current latest firmware version 1.5.14, but still take this with a grain of salt) is that the Discovery options work as follows:

• The Broadcast option controls whether the switch broadcasts on the 3 discovery protocols at the top. (Ubiquiti, Cisco & LLDP) So basically if you want the switch to broadcast on one of those protocol you have to enable both the protocol option & the broadcast option.


• The "Discovery Tab" option controls whether the switch listens on the 3 selected protocols at the top and also enables the the Discovery Tab page. So if you want the switch to listen to one of the protocols you have to enable both the Protocol and the Discovery Tab option. (Note that the Discovery menu option is always present under the Tools tab, but if the Discovery Tab options is disabled and you try to go to the Discovery page, you get a message that you need to enable Discovery. Note also that I believe the Discovery Tab option was broken in some past firmware versions meaning that the Discovery Tab page was always enabled even if the option in Configuration was disabled. This appears to be fixed at least in the current 1.5.14 firmware.


• So in summary, the 3 protocol options (Ubiquiti, Cisco & LLDP) only do something if you also enable either the Discovery Tab or Broadcast options. Further, because of how the options work, there does not appear to be a way to only broadcast on one protocol while listening on all 3.


• IMHO a better layout for these options would be to nest two sets of Ubiquiti, Cisco & LLDP protocol options under both the Broadcast & Discovery Tab options so you could decide which protocols you wanted to broadcast vs listen on separately. At the very least, if the option to allow listening & broadcasting on different protocols isn't something that they want to provide, still move the 3 protocol options under the Broadcast & Discovery Tab options, and only enable the 3 protocol options if either Broadcast or Discovery were enabled as I think that would make the options more intuitive. Especially since currently you can enable the "Broadcast on Protocols" option without enabling a Protocol, which does nothing. And you can also "enable" (check the boxes) for a Protocol without enabling either the Discovery Tab or Broadcast option, which also does nothing.