Failover partner state is showing an invalid date

[Glenn Satchell]

Hi Dominique

That's actually quite normal and not a problem. The partner date is the 
first time they ever communicated, and never gets updated again.

What version of dhcpd are you running?

Older versions (3.0.x) had problems maintaining good synchronisation 
between failover partners, but there has been lots of work fixing these 
issues, and later versions are much better.

The "brute force" method is to shutdown the secondary, rename the leases 
file, create a new, zero length leases file and start it up again. It 
will copy over all the leases from the other server.

regards,
-glenn

On 10/07/10 01:04, Dominique MARGOT wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We encountered several problems with our failover DHCP servers (mainly
> error messages such as "peer holds all free leases" while it should be
> enough IP addresses available).
>
> I dig through the logs and dhcpd.leases, and I found something strange.
> Failover partner state is showing an invalid date on one of the server,
> not on the second.
> Partner state is correct, but the date is wrong.
> dhcpd.log contains correct information about states and dates.
>
> I guess failover communication is broken somewhere.  What could you
> advise me ?
>
> Both servers are running Solaris 10 - dhcp-4.1.0
>
> Regards.
>
>
> ns2-mgt root:var/run # grep "my state" dhcpd.leases
>    my state normal at 2 2010/10/05 14:03:06;
>    my state communications-interrupted at 3 2010/10/06 08:46:59;
>    my state communications-interrupted at 3 2010/10/06 08:46:59;
>    my state normal at 3 2010/10/06 08:47:03;
> ns2-mgt root:var/run # grep "partner state" dhcpd.leases
>    partner state normal at 3 2009/03/25 14:20:55;
>    partner state normal at 3 2009/03/25 14:20:55;
>    partner state normal at 3 2009/03/25 14:20:55;
>    partner state normal at 3 2009/03/25 14:20:55;
>
>
> ns3-mgt root:var/run # grep "my state" dhcpd.leases
>    my state normal at 2 2010/10/05 14:03:06;
>    my state normal at 2 2010/10/05 14:03:06;
>    my state normal at 2 2010/10/05 14:03:06;
>    my state normal at 2 2010/10/05 14:03:06;
>    my state normal at 2 2010/10/05 14:03:06;
> ns3-mgt root:var/run # grep "partner state" dhcpd.leases
>    partner state normal at 2 2010/10/05 13:33:06;
>    partner state normal at 2 2010/10/05 13:33:06;
>    partner state communications-interrupted at 2 2010/10/05 13:33:06;
>    partner state communications-interrupted at 2 2010/10/05 13:33:06;
>    partner state normal at 2 2010/10/05 13:33:06;
>