Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@durd

durd/securestacking.md

Last active February 7, 2022 13:16
Show Gist options
  • Save durd/057859b24bfec6290729a3c6d7eccb67 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save durd/057859b24bfec6290729a3c6d7eccb67 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Encountered an annoying and seemingly impossible to Google error when stacking two 9500's
Raw
securestacking.md

Secure StackWise

When trying to stack two 9500s we encountered the error below, the switch rebooted but to our surprise the only active switch also rebooted and caused an outage in the network.
SESA: Master authentication failure. Err: 36

While Googling I found a NIST document with the acronym SESA and something about secure stacking. Lo and behold show secure-stackwise-virtual is available in the commandline.

Apparently, the active switch had been configured with Secure Stackwise, but the new standby had not. The Secure StackWise configuration is not evident in the show running-configuration so we simply missed that it was configured.
Once we had configured the authentication key and reloaded the standby switch, we were able to connect the standby without issues.

More info at Cisco.com

@durd
Copy link
Author

durd commented Feb 7, 2022

Adding this hoping that it might help somebody else.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment