74 CHAPTER 4: CREATING AN XRN STACKING FABRIC
Guidelines For 
Interconnecting 
Units
This section offers some guidelines for creating a Fabric. Using these 
guidelines will help prevent problems arising when setting up your Fabric.
■ The maximum number of Switch units that can be interconnected is 
eight.
■ It is not possible to create a Fabric by interconnecting a 3Com Switch 
5500 with any other 3Com device (such as a 5500G-EI) or mix 
Enhanced Image (EI) Switch 5500 units with Standard Image (SI) units.
■ 3Com strongly recommends that you upgrade all Switches to be 
interconnected to the latest software agent.
■ 3Com recommends that you remove the configuration file from a 
Switch unit that has previously been used elsewhere in your network 
before you interconnect to an existing unit. If you do not do this, 
problems may be caused by conflicting Switch configurations. Use the 
dir command from the User View to display the configuration files 
stored on the Switch and locate the [filename].cfg file. Do NOT 
under any circumstances remove the 3comoscfg.def file (this is the 
default configuration file).
For a detailed description of how XRN Technology operates and 
implementation guidelines, please refer to the Configuration Guide on 
the CD-ROM that accompanies your Switch.
Unit Numbering 
within the Fabric
When a Fabric is created using the Switch 5500 the unit numbering can 
be determined in two ways. 
■ You can manually assign unit IDs 1 to 8 to specific units using the 
change[self-unit, unit-id] to [1-8, 
auto-numbering] command from the System View. If you 
manually assign unit IDs to a Switch via the change command the IDs 
will be retained after a power cycle. 
If you add a unit to a Fabric that has previously been manually 
configured with a unit ID and this conflicts with an ID already within 
the Fabric, then the Switch with the lowest MAC address assumes the 
ID in question and the other unit will automatically renumber.
3Com recommends that you manually assign the unit IDs within the 
Fabric if you wish to have predictability of knowing which units have 
which IDs at all times.
■ Fabric topology is ‘discovered’ and the units auto-number their IDs.