dhcpd.leases Contains Lots of Very Old Leases

[Eric Kenny]

Hello,

We are running dhcpd version 4.1.0a1 and have recently discovered a 
problem with our lease file.  There appears to be quite a number of leases 
that expired more than 8 months ago that are still in there.  According to 
the dhcpd.leases man page "From time to time, dhcpd removes obsolete 
information to prevent the file from becoming too large."  It seems like 
this may not be happening.

I found the lease file problem because we were having an issue where dhcp 
requests would time out on the client.  When we removed about 12,000 
obsolete leases, the timeouts seemed to be occurring less often.  Now the 
lease file has about 24,000+ leases, some of which are still active.  I 
know I can comment out a subnet in dhcpd.conf, kill the server, and start 
it again to clear out all the leases in that subnet.  However, I would 
think that dhcpd is supposed to do all of this automatically.

Are we running into a bug?  Any information is appreciated. 

Eric J. Kenny
Network Analyst
Marist College 
3399 North Rd.
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
845.575.3820