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If it’s an IP camera, you can solve the problem by carrying a little switch and patch cable. The switch plugged into an Ethernet port, then the jumper cable plugged across two of the ports in the switch. If the camera is on the same network no appreciable amount of data will be getting from that camera back to where it is supposed to be recording

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Why is that? Wouldn't it just double the data volume, or does it do something else?

It'll make the switch gum the network up with broadcast and multicast packets forever looping around the switch.

Back in my high school days, looping two Ethernet ports with a patchcord was a trick you could use to take down the entire school network. I was under impression that modern hardware has safeguards against that, though.

This safeguard is called STP (spanning tree protocol). I've seen it only in managed swithes and most SOHO swithes are unmanaged. It is easy to detect usage of STP using tcpdump.

What?

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