Failover without shared-network?

Ken Roberts ken at hoverclub.net
Wed Jul 19 17:42:46 UTC 2006


On Wed, 2006-07-19 at 12:03, David W. Hankins wrote:
> I don't see anything immediately wrong with this config syntax.
> 
> Can you tell us precisely what error dhcpd emitted?


I can't right now.  The server is in production, and since one of my
alternate servers self destructed my spare is now in use for something
else until I can get a replacement.

The error message I got was in /var/log/messages.  When I started the
server it complained that my failover peer could not be defined outside
of a shared-network, or something similar.  Then the server would exit. 
By the way, I discovered that it's unwise to work on the dhcp server
when working from a box which gets its address from that dhcp server. 
:)

After Glenn's comments I wonder if there was something else that
complained about the lack of a shared-network and maybe I just thought
it was the failover peer.  Whatever it was, I fought with it for hours
before giving up and reverting to the original configuration.

I couldn't experiment last night because we had people working late. 
Hopefully I can experiment tonight.

The assertion that it's possible to use failover without a
shared-network construct is very helpful.  The idea that they depended
on each other was extremely frustrating, because they should have
nothing to do with each other.  You guys are saying it's all my
imagination, which is fine.  I'll start over again if I have to, RTFM a
few times and dive in.  I don't see what should be so complicated about
it, so maybe I was just too tired to see the stuff I needed to know.

Question:  In the man page for dhcpd.conf, it suggests that starting the
server in partner-down state looks like this:

(lease file)
failover peer _name_ state {
  my state parner-down;
  peer state _state_ at _date_;
}

This time, rather than trying to get two servers up simultaneously, I
want to get it up on the first one, then get the backup peer working. 
So what state is the peer in, and do I need that line?  I assume state
8, but if I don't want the date in there then what do I put?

Thanks.




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