This read-write switch controls whether the device generates traps related to RAPS (Ring Automatic Protection Switching, per ITU-T G.8032) alarms, covering fault conditions detected on an Ethernet ring protection topology this device participates in. Because RAPS is specifically designed to reroute ring traffic automatically around a break, a RAPS alarm trap is what tells an admin such a reroute event actually occurred, even though the ring's self-healing nature may mean no customer ever noticed a service interruption. Without this trap enabled, an admin could remain unaware that the ring has been running in a protected, single-point-of-failure, state since a break occurred, until a second failure on the ring causes an actual outage.