Black Box KV5300 Series manual SET Width of Submasters IBM and Multiplatform Models only

SERVSWITCH™ AND SERVSWITCH ULTRA™

4.3.9SET WIDTH OF SUBMASTERS (IBM AND MULTIPLATFORM MODELS ONLY)

Use this command to tell an IBM only or multiplatform ServSwitch master how “wide” your submasters are (that is, how many ports each of them has). If your submasters are all 4-port models, set the Width to 4; if they are all 8-port models, set the Width to 8; and so on.

Because initial configuration and reconfiguration would be complex and time- consuming otherwise, Width is an all-or-nothing proposition for the ServSwitch: One Width value is used for every port. Because this is true, we strongly recommend that all submasters you attach to a master ServSwitch be the same size. If you must attach different-sized submasters, please recognize that you probably either will be unable to use some ports or will have to account for nonexistent ports when you calculate port numbers and when you scan. See Section 3.3.2.

Figure 4-1 on the next page is an illustration of why ServSwitches need to know this value. Without a number for Width—even assuming that Units is set correctly to 4—if you were to select CPU 7 on either Switch, they would not know whether CPU 7 was attached to the submaster on port 4, the one on port 2, or (though an example of this isn’t shown) the one on port 1. With Width, the ServSwitch knows to switch to port 4 and send the “switch to port 1” command if Width is 2, or to switch to port 2 and send the “switch to port 3” command if Width is 4.

The default setting for Width is 16. To issue the Set Width of Submasters command for a ServSwitch (which you may do at any time), press and release the left Control key, type [W] followed by the number of ports on the attached submasters (from 1 to 3 digits), and press [ENTER]. Enter the Keep Settings command after you enter this command. Width can be set to any value from 2 to 255, but Width values higher than 16 (allowed in order to support future expansion capabilities) might cause the ServSwitch to behave unpredictably.

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