Request on offered address gives "unknown lease"

[perl-list]

I don't know what caused that in our case, but I did see this once when our primary DHCP server died. The secondary was struggling handing out leases having not enough addresses to hand out and so on. I saw some messages similar to yours in the logs: 

"Oct 24 12:31:25 gauss dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 10.230.177.173 (10.83.45.30) from 00:c0:29:26:43:fa via 10.230.177.3: unknown lease 10.230.177.173."

Specifically the unknown lease and noticed the address in parens that isn't usually there (unless that packet was meant for the other server in the  failover pair).

In my case, the address in parens was the secondary that was still up.  I never found out what the deal was as these were production and we needed them to work.  We disabled failover and everything then worked fine.  

Was a bear to get the servers back in to failover later, but that is another story.