DHCP4 failover pair hanging after startup

[Tom Griffin]

Evan Hunt wrote:
> As I understand it (though I have to confess, the failover protocol is a
> maze of twisty little passages to me), every time you bring the a server
> down and back up, it has to wait for the maximum client lead time (which is
> be configured with the "mclt" option in your conf file) before giving out
> any leases.  It does this to make sure both servers are on the same page
> about what leases are active and which server has responsibility for them.
>   

We left the server for nearly 3 hours in this state and it never 
recovered, so either the mclt option isn't working correctly or this is 
not the problem.

Using the same leases and configuration file with 3.1.1 doesn't have 
this problem with hanging, so we are sticking to that as we don't need 
the v6 support just yet. My naive mind says this suggests a bug has 
crept into 4.0.0, but it may be our application of the configuration file.

> Instead of restarting your server multiple times a day, try using
> omshell to add hosts

This is very interesting, I didn't realise this was an option. Am I 
right in understanding that we would need to perform the omshell host 
create on both servers individually to add the host to each of the 
leases files? Also, I assume we would also need to append the hosts to 
the config file to make the change permanent?

Thanks for the help, it is much appreciated!

Tom.