[Kea-users] Kea-DHCP4 HA-Maintenance and Hub-and-Spoke configuration

[Carsten Strotmann]

Hi Marcin,

thanks for the quick reply.

On 9 Jul 2025, at 17:36, Marcin Siodelski wrote:

> Carsten
> The following chapter: https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/kea-3.0.0/arm/hooks.html#controlled-shutdown-and-maintenance-of-dhcp-servers explains that:
>
> "If the server has many relationships with different partners, the ha-maintenance-start command attempts to transition all of the relationships into the partner-in-maintenance state by sending ha-maintenance-notify to all partner servers. If this step fails for any server, an error is returned. If that happens, the ha-maintenance-cancel command can be used to resume normal operations and fix the issue."
>

this behaviour seems to be quite an operational risk. In an hub-and-spoke setup with many (> 40) HA-relationships, one "spoke" DHCP-server needing maintenance will result in all relationships going into maintenance. That puts quite a burden (and possibly load) on the "hub" server.

I've opened feature request #4002 in Gitlab, maybe the HA-maintenance can be improved in future versions.

Greetings

Carsten