i tried disabling MSTP on the bridge
Unless you have multi-path networking in the face of VLANs and need to scope different rules to particular VLANs or sets of them, you should be using RSTP instead.
setting STP to NONE
In my experience, that's usually either a mistake engendered by a misunderstanding of what STP does and what it's for, or done to deal with something that doesn't implement Ethernet properly. Some form of STP should almost always be enabled unless you know for a fact that it's causing problems and that problem can't be fixed some better way.
For instance, I've seen network engineers do this to speed old-school STP up when they should instead be setting ports that can never loop to "Edge", in order to bypass most of the delay involved with the original STP protocol.
Okay, you may say, but it's faster, so it's better, right? That's true as long as that "can never loop" condition remains true. Then some yo-yo moves their VoIP phone to another side of the desk and in the process finds that it has a loop-through feature and decides both ports should be plugged into the room's uplink ports, not realizing that it previously had only one connected for a very good reason. Boom, down goes your network.
I always thought flow control is good
It would be if it were widely supported and obeyed, but it isn't, which is why it's disabled by default.
Most of the time it's pointless since TCP has flow control built into it, and most non-TCP protocols (e.g. DNS, NTP…) can't normally cause the levels of network congestion that make flow control necessary. Unless you're in the rare condition of having high-bandwidth non-TCP flows and you know all of the devices involved properly support hardware flow control, you should leave it disabled.
Wouldn't that be a good idea for e.g. ports where only 100Mbit devices are connected
If you've got slow devices that are getting spammed off the network, there are usually better solutions than Ethernet flow control:
- use ROS queueing instead
- enable as much broadcast and multicast filtering as you can on those ports, consistent with maintaining required services
- put the affected devices into another VLAN, and set up careful routing and firewalling to keep unwanted traffic out of that VLAN
- for cases where a given network device only needs to talk to one other peer or a small set of them, move them to another physical LAN; for instance, you might have an ancient laser printer that gets spammed off the network by Windows Network Neighborhood broadcast storms, but only one PC actually needs to use that printer still, and it has a second Ethernet port, so you could use that port to set up a private point-to-point network between those two hosts