Connecting stacks of switches

[ezguine]

Hi All,
Looking for some help on this. I need to link to stacks of 3Com 4400SE's. There would be 2 groups of 5 switches, with 1 remote switch linked off a port on each stack for a total of 12.

I'm under the impression you cannot stack more than 8 switches or 192 ports. Any suggestions on using this many switches without using a LAN router or VLAN's ?

Thanks
Kenny

 

[bponeill]

Kenny, here is a trick I used and it worked with stacking more than 4 4250T switches. This will only work if you are using something like gigabit backbone uplinks to stack the units.
Stack the first 5 switches normally. Take the 2nd uplink port from the 5th unit (port 26) and connect it to the 2nd uplink port on unit 6 (port 26). Then connect the 1st uplink port on unit 6 (port 25) to the first uplink port on unit 7 (port 25). This will create a stack of 5, a single stand alone unit, and a stack of 4. By reversing the uplink ports on unit 6 it stops switch #6 from joining a stack. Of course, this only works if you are using