Backstory: I am in the process of replacing a SINGLE Debian 3.1 (Sarge) ISC-DHCP-SERVER with 2 Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64 servers running ISC-DHCP-SERVER in failover mode. I've been unable to find the answer to this on Google, and my internal testing on an empty subnet has yielded interesting results (please note I'm relatively new to Linux):
Here are my 3 questions:
1) Should I copy the dhcpd.leases and dhcpd.leases~ files from my Debian server to /var/lib/dhcp/ on both of the new servers and then start the DHCP services? Will the files then balance themselves?
2) Should I copy the dhcpd.leases and dhcpd.leases~ files to /var/lib/dhcp/ on only the primary failover server, and let the secondary server generate one from scratch after the DHCP services have been started?
3) Should I not bother copying the files at all, and let the 2 new Ubuntu servers generate the files from scratch in /var/lib/dhcp/?
Something else I probably should have mentioned is that the Debian server is running ISC-DHCP-SERVER 3.0.1, and the 2 new servers are running ISC-DHCP-SERVER 4.1-ESV-R4
TIA!
I got some help over on another forum: Given the fact we don't care if our servers retain the same DHCP leases, I'll be going with brand new, empty files.
As since you are using DHCP server then I assume that you don't need to know your IPs and thus you don't need to store the dhcp leases.
For that Just run your DHCP servers and forget all of old time :)