I have a network that was all statically assinged in the past, moving it to DHCP. Some hosts, we have as reservations, but not all of them..
Our server is running bind dhcpd on cenotos 5, with webmin to configure.
If I create a "pool" of ip's 10-254 in our network, I know it will skip the reservations, but will it first try pinging IP's before they are handed out? I am not positive if we got all of them in the reservation table that need to be, and don't want a mess of duplicate IP's. Or do I need to manually scan the subnet (and hope everyone has their laptop in the office, and turned on?)?
The dhcpd server will check for IPs by trying to ping the IP first, then assign the IP if it doesn't reply. If it does reply, it will mark the IP "abandoned". If a DHCP client tries to get an IP address, but none are available, but there are abandoned IP addresses, then the DHCP server will attempt to reclaim an abandoned IP address.
If you have users still using static IPs (locally, not a reservation), and they are not on the network at the time of allocation - then you would have duplicates.