DHCP leases till 2038! abandoned.
 

I've got a very old dhcp server which is behaving weirdly.

In the dhcp.leases file I see loads of the following:
but the lease time is set for 1 hour in dhcpd.conf (always has been) and this is verified by the fact that other leases in the same dhcpd.leases file show
Does anybody understand this? Is this a known problem or something?

I have manually deleted all the abandoned leases from dhcpd.leases before but they do reappear over time.

Why is it giving out leases till 2038??!


(server is dhcpd-2.0b1pl0-1 on Red Hat Linux release 6.1 - Yes you don't have to tell me, I will replace this)

I think if you replace the OS you'll stop having this problem.

03:14:07 on Jan 19, 2038 is the end of the UNIX epoch. It's basically linux's own Y2K problem, aptly named Y2K38. Once it gets there the date rolls over much like how windows machines would have rolled from 1999 to 1900.

Essentially your DHCP server is giving out leases till the end of time! Though it's a problem I think it's worth it to take a brief second and admire the subtle humor.

Maybe you could just upgrade dhcpd for now? Your DHCP problem is probably a bug that an OS upgrade should fix but as far as a temporary patch I'm not sure exactly how you'd tackle that if a bugfix doesn't work.

EDIT: I did look this up further but I couldn't find a solution nor can I figure out why it would do something like this. Good luck.

well, I've moved it to another server and stopped having that problem.

In fact that server is too new and unreliable to leave it on, but the original server I moved it to was the same server I run all the monitoring checks for my network on and when it was on there I ended up not being able to check the damn thing because it didn't return a DHCP offer for me to know that the DHCP service is OK.

How annoying. If you know of a way of making the isc dhcpd server give a dhcp offer to itself then I can move it back to that more stable server and have it tested as normal.