A stacked chassis comprising multiple physical switch/router chassis operates without any special stacking hardware or stacking channels. Instead, a stacking LAG is installed between front-end switch ports on the stacked chassis. The chassis controllers negotiate a master, which controls operation of all chassis in the stack. A stacked-chassis-wide port numbering scheme is used to distribute information to all line cards in the system. Each line card processes the information to distill physical-chassis significant information for operation of that chassis in the stack.