Allied Telesis AT-SBX31GC40 User Manual

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Chapter 7: Powering On the Chassis
184
Monitoring the Initialization Process
The control and line cards perform an initialization process when you 
power on or reset the chassis. The process may have up to three phases. 
The number of phases and their durations depend on the number of 
control cards in the chassis. There are three possible configurations:
Configuration 1: Chassis with one control card.
The initialization process for a chassis that has only one control 
card has two phases. The entire process takes approximately two 
minutes. In the first phase the control card initializes its 
management software. In the second phase the line cards initialize 
their management software and receive their configuration settings 
from the control card. The control and line cards begin forwarding 
network traffic at the completion of the initialization process.
Configuration 2: Chassis with two control cards that have identical 
configuration databases and load files.
The initialization process for a chassis with two control cards has 
three phases. The first two phases are the same as in configuration 
1. At their completion, the Ethernet line cards begin to forward 
traffic from their ports and the active control card starts to forward 
traffic across the backplane. At this point, the available bandwidth 
across the backplane is 200Mbps.
In the third phase the inactive control card synchronizes its 
database and load files with the active card. If the databases and 
files are already the same, the third phase requires about thirty 
seconds, after which the inactive control card joins with the active 
card in forwarding packets across the backplane, to provide the full 
400Mbps of backplane bandwidth.
Configuration 3: Chassis with two control cards that have different 
configuration databases and load files.
The initialization process for a chassis with two control cards has 
three phases. At the completion of the first two phases, which are 
the same as in configuration 1, the Ethernet line cards begin to 
forward traffic from their ports and the active control card starts to 
forward traffic across the backplane. At this point, the available 
bandwidth across the backplane is 200Mbps.
During the third phase, the inactive control card synchronizes its 
configuration database and load files with the active control card. 
The length of the third phase depends on the differences in the 
files, and may take several minutes to complete. During the 
synchronization, the inactive control card does not forward traffic 
across the backplane. Only after it has fully synchronized its files