Backstory: I am in the process of replacing a SINGLE Debian 3.1 (Sarge) ISC-DHCP-SERVER (v3.0.1) with 2 Ubuntu 12.04 LTS x64 servers running ISC-DHCP-SERVER (v4.1-ESV-R4) 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/?

TIA!
-Snipe

Hi everyone,

Managed to get some help on another forum: I'll be going with brand new, empty files given the fact we don't care if we retain the same DHCP leases.

Thanks,
-Snipe