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Jarmund
Asked: 2012-09-12 12:12:40 +0800 CST

dhcpd pool exhaustion - What's the result?

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I have a DHCP server that serves leases to several houndred, maybe up to a thousand, different clients on an average day. The pool consists of 242 IPs, and due to the highly dynamic nature of the network, it's enough 99% of the time (most devices are gone from the network in a few minutes), despite having a lease time of 3600.

Now, imagine if more clients than that connect to the network during an hour. The sollution is obvious: Decrease lease time, or increase the DHCP pool, however, what i would like to know: What happens when dhcpd has exhausted the pool? Are new DHCP requests simply ignored?

linux

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Your system will simply stop assigning IP addresses once the leases have been exhausted. This will also be reflected in the DHCP server's /var/log/messages. E.g. "No free leases".

    DHCPDISCOVER from 00:40:ee:40:38:f8 via eth0: network 10.1.1.0/24: no free leases

    On the device side, they will either get 0.0.0.0 or self-assigned 169.x.x.x addresses...

    Is expanding your subnet an option?

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  2. If your DHCP pool has been exhausted then your server will stop giving out addresses - it will not use up the oldest unused lease.

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