Installation guide

Release Notes for Catalyst5000 Family Software Release4.x

OL-2306-01

Usage Guidelines, Restrictions, and Troubleshooting

System and Supervisor Engine

This section contains usage guidelines, restrictions, and troubleshooting information that apply to the

supervisor engine and to the switch at the system level.

• A minor hardware problem that causes the switching bus to time out occurs during the power-on

self-test on the supervisor engine if the configuration includes a single WS-X550x (Supervisor

Engine II) and any combination of the WS-X5234-RJ45 and WS-X5236-FX-MT modules. This

problem occurs during every boot-up and is not software dependent.

This usage guideline applies only to switch configurations that consist of a single Supervisor Engine

II (WS-X550x) and any combination of the WS-X5234-RJ45 and WS-X5236-FX-MT modules.

Redundant configurations of Supervisor Engine II and Supervisor Engine III (WS-X5530) are not

affected by this problem.

• If you attempt to boot a Catalyst 5000 family switch and the switch generates continuous MCP

exception errors (and possibly fails to boot), make sure that the supervisor engine has the correct

software version for all of the hardware in your configuration. For information on the minimum and

recommended software versions for Catalyst 5000 family hardware, see the “Product and Software

Version Matrix” section on page6.

Caution Before powering up a Catalyst5500 (WS-C5500) switch with redundant power supplies, install at

least two modules in the chassis. If you power up a Catalyst5500 switch with redundant power

supplies with less than two modules installed, the red OUTPUT FAIL LED on one of the power

supplies might light, even though the supply is not faulty.

• After downloading a new Flash image, the next reboot might take longer than normal if Erasable

Programmable Logic Devices (EPLDs) on the supervisor engine need to be reprogrammed. Whether

this happens depends on which software version was running on the supervisor engine before the

download and which software version is downloaded. This can add up to 15 minutes to the normal

reboot time the first time you reboot with the new image.

• After initiating a switchover from the active supervisor engine to the standby supervisor engine, or

when inserting a redundant supervisor engine in an operating switch, always wait until the

supervisor engines have synchronized and all modules are online before removing or inserting

modules or supervisor engines, or performing another switchover.

• Under certain conditions, inserting a second supervisor engine into a running Catalyst5500 switch

might cause the switch to reset.

• Under certain conditions, Clock Module:B is Active after boot. This does not indicate any failure of

Clock Module:A. It is related to fluctuations in the boot sequence that select Clock Module:B over

Clock Module:A. All standard error query and notification processes accurately reflect the status of

the primary and standby clock modules.

• If your configuration produces thousands of content-addressable memory (CAM) entries, ensure

that your screen length is set to a value greater than 0 before entering the show cam dynamic

command.

• The LrnDiscard counter (displayed by entering the show mac command) indicates the number of

times a CAM entry is replaced with a newly learned address when the CAM table is full. The counter

value is not maintained for each port; instead, the value is maintained for the entire switch.

• The CLI command show cam dynamic and the SNMP query “getmany community@vlan

dot1dTpFdbAddress” are sometimes out of sync.