Failover and pools with single machines

[Simon Hobson]

Tina Siegenthaler wrote:
>Sorry to bother you again...  my new setup seems to work, at least 
>more or less. At least, I haven't heard anyone complaining about not 
>getting an IP address. What is odd, though, is that my "old" dhcp 
>server (which is now primary) still handles most of the leases. The 
>"new" peer assigns only very few addresses, about one each hour. 
>Shouldn't reach peer distribute roughly half of the addresses? What
>did I miss?


Clients will renew by unicast packet directly to the server they got 
their lease from. Since most of your clients already had an active 
lease, they will continue renewing it from the old server.

Any NEW clients will get distributed in a semi random manner between 
the servers, as will clients which let their leases expire.


Something else to bear in mind is the the response time of the 
servers, if one is consistently faster at getting a reply on the wire 
then it will get most of the clients.