Well to make matters worse, the switches now started trying to "call home" quite aggressively (every few seconds, maybe because they are being blocked by the firewall, so they keep re-trying) - constantly trying to open TCP connections to port 443 (HTTPS) to various hosts on tplinkcloud.com (n-devs-smb, n-deventry-smb)

 

I have disabled everything on the switches that I could think of could be causing such behavior, but without luck (everything on the "Controller Settings" tab has always been disabled, as I do not need cloud control for these switches).  Blocking the switches from DNS made the situation even worse as they kept re-trying DNS lookup for the above hosts several times per second.

 

Finally setting the gateway in the System IP Config on the switches to 0.0.0.0 was able to at least stop these outgoing connection attempts (although the 29810 broadcasts continue)

 

I really wish there was a way to put these switches into a quiet mode, where they simply perform their switching functions, without putting additional traffic in my network, unnecessary broadcasts, and unnecessary attempts to call home - such functionality should be opt-in, or at least possible to disable.

 

 

And I was just getting ready to buy a few :-( I will be watching this thread to see if a solution emerges

@unmesh 

 

I am currently thinking of putting the switches on an isolated management VLAN (these switches do support a management VLAN tag for the system IP) that has no routing or outbound access, so at least they will just be broadcasting to each other.

 

I would still prefer there was a way to disable this - maybe I am just missing something obvious.