Hi
I am on Windows 2008. Just wondering what kind of problems I can get into if my DHCP server fails. We are backing up the DHCP DB once a day and the lease period for some odd reason has been set to 1 day.
For the sake of discussion I want you to assume that I backed up my DB yesterday at 6 PM and my DHCP crashed today at 4 PM.
I can restore from my backup. But the entries in the backup could be stale.
There could be some IP Address that was allocated by the DHCP server today at 2 PM but is see as available in yesterday's backup. Post restoration, the server could try to lease out that IP Address to some other system. (I assume that the system that got the address at 2 PM would not contact the DHCP server again until 2 AM in the morning (50% of its least period)
There could be some IP Address that was assigned to some system at 3 PM (just before the crash) or not assigned at all but the backup taken yesterday could show the IP Address against a different system with active lease. In this case, if I try to use the DHCP log to identify a system on the network then I am likely to reach the incorrect system.
Is there some kind of reconciliation option where the DHCP could force all the clients to renew leases to get to some consistent state of the network?
Thanks
-GW