'peer holds all free leases' query

[David W. Hankins]

On Sat, Feb 24, 2007 at 10:34:29PM -0000, Pete Clarke wrote:
> > I am one of those, who regularly get 'peer holds all free leases'
> > message in dhcp log files in our failover environment. Occasionally,
> > I have to stop the daemon and purge lease database on one of the
> > server, when the problem gets particularly worse. We do use NTP to
> > sync time. I am using V3.0.4. Is there a feature in version after
> > 3.0.4 that can help to alleviate this issue? I do see a mention of
> > 'Failover servers try harder to retransmit binding updates upon
> > entering NORMAL state' in the release notes of 3.0.5rc2. Is it related?

It could be, but it's hard to say.

It is definitely one possible cause.

I'd have to look fairly closely at the dhcpd.leases files on both
systems to have any idea of what's going wrong (and even then it's
probable I'd only know what's wrong, not why it went wrong).

> I also get a lot of these.
> I have a fairly complex setup, lots of pools (~9,000) in a failover setup. I 
> get a lot of the "peer holds all free leases" messages.
> Server 2 doesn't seem to give any addresses out for certain pools.
> 
> Our setup is running 3.0.5 on Solaris. Would this just be "one of those 
> things" - we can't simply down one box to purge the leases - this is a 
> highly critical environment.

It isn't, and shouldn't be, normal, but there's an awful lot you'd
have to look at in order to figure out what's wrong, and then why
it went wrong (often, this is hidden in dhcpd.leases rewrites).

> Any thoughts?

The first pass is to compare the 'pool' log lines for given pools
between the two servers.

-- 
ISC Training!  http://www.isc.org/training/  training at isc.org
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-- 
David W. Hankins	"If you don't do it right the first time,
Software Engineer		you'll just have to do it again."
Internet Systems Consortium, Inc.	-- Jack T. Hankins