dhcpd related issues

[Olivier Nicole]

Hi James,

> I have a FreeBSD 7.0 gateway/server with isc-dhcpd 3.1.2p1_2. Late  
> yesterday I began having some unique and intermittent issues.  
> Basically, random computers will all of a sudden lose their dhcp  
> leases and be unable to contact the dhcp server.

I did not see any reply to your question.

It happened to me that a secondary switch was working badly with
DHCP. If I rebooted the switch, it would work for a while, then fail
again. But that was a sort of random failure, some ports would be
affected sometime. The problem would occur a the first lease in the
morning rather than at renewal time.

As it was a cheap switch, unmanageable, I replaced it.

> Sep 17 14:03:15 grendel dhcpd: ICMP Echo reply while lease  
> 192.168.1.253 valid.
> Sep 17 15:25:19 grendel dhcpd: ICMP Echo Reply for 192.168.1.74 late  
> or spurious.
> 
> which doesn't seem particularly relevant or heinous. Many more  
> computers than the ones above have been affected.

I don't remember ever seeing such error, but I would think that late
or spurions is not that innocent: it could be the symptom of a switch
not working at its nominal speed.

Of  course you could  also consider  a computer  on that  switch being
infected by some kind of virus and generating so much traffic it takes
your switch out.

Bests,

Olivier