This flag controls whether or not the device will send self healing packets. Self healing packets are normally sent once per second by the agent when no other traffic is present. When there is no traffic present on a network, there is no way to detect cabling problems (or the repair of cabling problems) and status LEDs are not always correct.

Enabling this flag allows the agent to detect cabling problems on an idle network. This flag can be disabled if self healing packets are not wanted.

On the 100BaseVG-AnyLAN SNMP/Bridge card, these packets are addressed to a unique unused unicast station address which has been reserved by HP for this purpose. On 802.3 repeaters, these packets are self addressed.

On an 802.3 repeater, this flag MUST be enabled when using the Robust Port Healing feature. Without Robust Port Healing either a good transmit or a good receive will reconnect an autopartitioned port. With Robust Port Healing the criteria is more restrictive and only a good transmit will heal a segmented port. If all ports are segmented, the repeater will not repeat anything until the agent transmits a self healing packet and reconnects the autopartitioned ports.