[Kea-users] Unable to open PID file '/var/lib/kea/dhcp4.leases.pid' for write

[Darren Ankney]

Hi Sebastian,

How have you installed and started Kea?  Is it possible that the LFC
process is not running as the user _kea?  Is it possible that you are
out of disk space?  How about apparmor or SELinux.  Perhaps one of
these is interfering?

The error message is documented here:
https://kea.readthedocs.io/en/latest/kea-messages.html#lfc-fail-pid-create
and the code is here:
https://gitlab.isc.org/isc-projects/kea/-/blob/master/src/lib/util/pid_file.cc#L63-65

It seems pretty clear that Kea tried to open the file and could not
for some reason.

Thank you,
Darren Ankney

On Mon, Jan 26, 2026 at 6:53 AM Schöpke, Sebastian <schoepke at gipmbh.de> wrote:
>
> Hi community,
> I've encountered a strange issue with the lease file cleanup process. I’m running KEA 2.6. In the logs, I see the following message:
> DhcpLFC[957938]: FATAL [DhcpLFC.137942855559616] LFC_FAIL_PID_CREATE : Unable to open PID file '/var/lib/kea/dhcp4.leases.pid' for write
> However, the lease file does not exist, and the directory is writable by the _kea user:
> $ ls -al /var/lib/kea/
> drwxr-x---  2 _kea _kea       4096 Jan 26 10:40 .
> drwxr-xr-x 53 root root       4096 Nov 14  2024 ..
> -rw-r--r--  1 _kea _kea 1228404934 Jan 26 11:09 dhcp4.leases
> $ whoami
>
> _kea
>
> $ touch /var/lib/kea/dhcp4.leases.pid
> $ ls /var/lib/kea/dhcp4.leases.pid
> /var/lib/kea/dhcp4.leases.pid
> The _kea user can definitely write to this location.
> So what could be going wrong here? Any help would be appreciated.
> Thank you!
> Best regards,
> Sebastian Schoepke
>
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