C1000 Re-enabling GUI Single point management

[DavidMeldrum23057]

I have two C1000 that are h-stacked and using the Web UI to manage them. It all worked great, but when I bought a third switch I was unable to get it to join the others and when I plugged it in, the first two fell apart. The switches are handling traffic fine, but the web interface now only shows one of switches. The error log is complaining about too many clients on the same network address, which is the address I assigned for the GUI. Do I need to reassign h-stack ports before connecting them? I am missing some step or procedure to get these managed with same UI
What is the procedure to add a new switch?
Should it be Factory Reset first?
What is the correct order to follow?
plugin power to new switch
wait for light to come on steady
hold the front button for 2 seconds
wait for light to come on again
plug h-stack cable into stacking port with other switches
How much time to wait for stacking to complete... is an hour enough?

[Georg Pauwen]

Hello,

hard to say. Check the link below if you are hitting one of the restrictions:

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst1000/software/releases/15_2_7_e/configuration_guides/stacking/b_1527e_single_ip_management_c1000_cg.html#reference_axy_kh3_4jb

[DavidMeldrum23057]

Thanks for reply.  I have been over this material several times and at one time I had two of the switches managed under one Web UI. I know there is an issue with non Cisco SFTs, but these worked and the switches are conducting network traffic over the h-stack cables, just no management.  Show switch says:

1 member 0 mac address  provisioned
*2 master a mac address  ready

The provisioned member is not connect to the GUI

[Georg Pauwen]

Hello,

I assume the h-stack ports all show up correctly when you issue the command 'show switch hstack-ports' ?

Not sure what you have already tried, but you could remove the cables from the provisioned switch, turn the switch off, the remove the provisioned switch from the stack ( no switch 1 provision), the reconnect everything and re-provision the switch (switch 1 provision 1)...

[DavidMeldrum23057 · Accepted solution]

Solved! I found my problem!
Actually two problems, but the first one I should have have spotted and it is actually subtly mentioned in the documentation.

Problem#1: When configuring a h-stack port you must state a "stack port".  This does not mean the switch port number (my mistake) but a different number called "stack port". A stack port can either be "stack port" one or two. Since there can only be two stack ports for a switch you assign one of them as "1" and the other as "2".  Remember that if your switch has more than two ports eligible to be a stack ports only two can be used, and those are the ones to plug the stacking cable into.

Problem #2: I never saw this mentioned anywhere, but it makes sense. While you are configuring switches to be horizontally stacked, they must be standalone and off the network, i.e. not plugged into anything else or an external DHCP. That also means not connected to any other switch.  Part of the stacking process includes assigning all of the stacked switches with the same administrative IP address. Apparently the reason for this is during the configuration process the the switches will fight over the IP address and lock the other one out. After all the units have been configured "off line", then connect them together and then connect them to the network.  Once the stacking process is complete the master stack will answer to the Admin IP address and the other "slave" units will remain quite. Once this is done they seamlessly can be powered on and off and will rejoin the htsack ring.