DHCP Redundancy

[sthaug at nethelp.no]

> So is it possible to maintain a central or distributed leases file for 
> multiple (unknown quantity) of servers?

Not with today's ISC DHCP. The DHCP failover protocol, and the ISC
implementation, is specifically geared towards *two* servers in a
"failover pair".

> I ask because I am working on a design to change over all of my wireless 
> clients to dhcp. With the wide spread nature of the network, ALL 
> services are distributed so that any single point can fail and 
> everything else stays active. This assumes that the point of failure 
> will never recover. The system MUST be able to handle this 
> automatically. I definitely do not have 2x the address space as others 
> suggested. I kind of assumed that the dhcp servers maintained 
> synchronised information regarding leases.
> 
> I estimate the need for 17 dhcp servers (right now) distributed across 
> the system handling multiple /18's (in total) of address space. Can this 
> be handled?

Not with today's ISC DHCP.

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug at nethelp.no