DHCP failover - first startup of primary fails with no secondary installed

[Nicola Volpini]

Hello,

I'm running a dhcp failover setup and the primary server never comes out
of recovery mode.

The primary is currently the only node of the pair running, the
secondary has still to be installed (this is an automatic deployment via
puppet, the second node will follow).

This is the primary peer config part:

failover peer "dhcp-failover" {
   primary;
   address 10.50.32.10;
   port 520;
   peer address 10.50.32.11;
   peer port 520;
   max-response-delay 60;
   max-unacked-updates 10;
   load balance max seconds 3;
   mclt 90;
   split 128;
}

I lowered the mclt value to speed up the recovery process, but after
more than ten hours the dhcp is still in recovery mode.
I checked the time and it's fine (synced with ntp). I stopped the
service and removed the dhcpd.leases* files, I even created an empty
dhcpd.leases. The server never leaves recovery mode.
Here's the log after a fresh restart. Letting the mclt expire does not
give positive results, as I wrote:

May  9 09:16:27 dhcp-server-hostname kernel: [493193.760255] init:
isc-dhcp-server main process (28725) killed by TERM signal
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: Internet Systems Consortium
DHCP Server 4.1-ESV-R4
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: Copyright 2004-2011 Internet
Systems Consortium.
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: All rights reserved.
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: For info, please visit
https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: Internet Systems Consortium
DHCP Server 4.1-ESV-R4
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: Copyright 2004-2011 Internet
Systems Consortium.
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: All rights reserved.
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: For info, please visit
https://www.isc.org/software/dhcp/
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: Wrote 0 class decls to
leases file.
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: Wrote 0 deleted host decls
to leases file.
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: Wrote 0 new dynamic host
decls to leases file.
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: Wrote 0 leases to leases file.
May  9 09:16:40 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: failover peer dhcp-failover:
I move from recover to startup
May  9 09:16:45 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from
e8:39:35:19:2f:54 via 192.168.0.2: not responding (startup)
May  9 09:16:55  dhcpd: last message repeated 2 times
May  9 09:16:55 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: failover peer dhcp-failover:
I move from startup to recover
May  9 09:16:59 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from
e8:39:35:19:2f:54 via 192.168.0.2: not responding (recovering)
May  9 09:17:27 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from
e8:39:35:19:2f:55 via 192.168.0.2: not responding (recovering)
May  9 09:18:12  dhcpd: last message repeated 4 times
May  9 09:18:12 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from
e8:39:35:19:2f:54 via 192.168.0.2: not responding (recovering)
May  9 09:18:58  dhcpd: last message repeated 4 times
May  9 09:18:58 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from
e8:39:35:19:2f:55 via 192.168.0.2: not responding (recovering)
May  9 09:19:42  dhcpd: last message repeated 3 times
May  9 09:19:42 dhcp-server-hostname dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from
e8:39:35:19:2f:54 via 192.168.0.2: not responding (recovering)

and so on...

Some more details:

OS: Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS
isc-dhcp-server version: 4.1.ESV-R4-0ubuntu5.6

The dhcp works just fine without the failover part.

I'd like to add we had the same issue on a different site. We solved it
by installing both the primary and the secondary and letting them sync
for the first time. Is this step a hard requirement I missed?

Thank you!

--
Nicola Volpini
Infrastructure Operations Engineer


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