Administration: Stack Management
Unit Failure in Stack
69 Cisco 500 Series Stackable Managed Switch Administration Guide Release 1.3
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If a unit is inserted into a running stack, and is selected as a backup unit, the master 
synchronizes it so that it has an up-to date configuration, and then generates a 
SYNC COMPLETE SYSLOG message. This is a unique SYSLOG message that 
appears only when backup is converging with the master unit, and looks like this: 
%DSYNCH-I-SYNCH_SUCCEEDED: Synchronization with unit 2 is finished 
successfully. 
Master/Backup Switchover
When a master fails or when you configure a force master on the backup unit, a 
switchover occurs. 
The backup unit becomes the master, and all of its processes and protocol stacks 
are initialized to take responsibility for the entire stack. As a result, there is 
temporarily no traffic forwarding in this unit, but slave units remain active.
NOTE When STP is used and the ports are in link up, the STP port’s state is temporarily 
Blocking, and it cannot forward traffic or learn MAC addresses. This is to prevent 
spanning tree loops between active units.
Slave Unit Handling
While the backup becomes the master, the active slave units remain active and 
continue to forward packets based on the configuration from the original master. 
This minimizes data traffic interruption in units. 
After the backup unit has completed the transition to the master state, it initializes 
the slave units one at a time by performing the following operations:
• Clear and reset the configuration of the slave unit to default (to prevent an 
incorrect configuration from the new master unit). As a result, there is no 
traffic forwarding on the slave unit.
• Apply related user configurations to the slave unit. 
• Exchange dynamic information such as port STP state, dynamic MAC 
addresses, and link up/down status between the master and the slave unit. 
Packet forwarding on the slave unit resumes after the state of its ports are 
set to forwarding by the master according to STP. 
NOTE Packet flooding to unknown unicast MAC addresses occurs until the 
MAC addresses are learned or relearned.