dhcpd.leases issue

Simon Hobson dhcp1 at thehobsons.co.uk
Tue Mar 13 16:21:43 UTC 2007


At 12:30 -0300 13/3/07, Thiago Drechsel wrote:
>Hi all.
>
>I'm looking at my dhcpd.leases file and found that there are several
>entries for IP 10.20.161.98, as you can see below:

snip

>The question is. Shouldn't I have only one single entry for ip
>10.20.161.98? Or more than one entry is normal?

If you'd looked in the archives you'd have seen that this is a FAQ !

Yes, it is normal, the leases file is a log file - ie all new data is 
appended to it, nothing is ever modified. So every time any change 
occurs, such as a client renewing it's lease, a new record is written.

This is done for reliability - if the server crashes at an 
inopportune moment then it is highly unlikely to corrupt the leases 
database.

If the server is restarted, it will read through the file, and end up 
with the last state found for any particular address.

Periodically (once an hour in the current version), the server writes 
out a new file from it's in-memory tables, and swaps it with the 
current file. After this cleanup there will only be the latest 
version of any lease - but new activity will once again be appended 
to it.



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