DHCP not working properly (Solved)

alienz

At first I thought it may be an issue with vlans, and it still may be. I'm not the best with networking so I'm not sure.

I know it's overkill but this was made up of spare parts I had sitting around, pfSense box:
P8H61 mobo
i5-2500k
8GB 1333 RAM
120GB SSD

Netgear GS108T
Ubiquiti UAP-AC-LR

This is currently my setup, I want the vlans on the physical LAN because eventually I'd like to segregate them into a few different things, so I'm starting by just getting the one working.

I have the firewall rules in place for any-any on vlans 10, 20 as well as the default any-any rules on the LAN interface.

Originally when I first fired up the box I configured DHCP on my LAN interface with the address range of 10.0.0.10-253. I've since disabled that and restart the DHCP service. Even though that's been done, any device that plugs into the switch will get an IP from that DHCP pool.

DHCP won't hand out any address but on the pool that I disabled. On my PC I can manually configure an IP in vlan 10 and it will work.

On my wireless networks, I can configure devices with a proper IP from either vlan 20 or 30 and they'll work fine, get to the internet and everything else just fine.

So I'm not sure if DHCP on pfSense is the issue of it's how I've set up the vlans in my network. I've spent the last 20 hours searching, reading threads, making changes, but to no avail.

As I mentioned I'm not the best with networking and if I had to do it over I wouldn't have bought this switch as the UI isn't very useful or intuitive. The networking portion I can't figure out is the vlans/pvid stuff and if that's what's the root cause of my issue or not.

alienz

So I've got a new switch up and running, vlans set up properly, yet for some reason it keeps handing out DHCP to clients from a DHCP pool that's disabled and doesn't exist.

There's no DHCP leases listed in pfSense. The LAN interface DHCP is disabled.

I've done ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew yet it still pulls from a nonexistent DHCP scope/pool.

The logs do show my PC requesting and getting DNS from pfSense:

Oct 10 16:06:07	dhcpd		DHCPDISCOVER from xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx via igb1
Oct 10 16:06:08	dhcpd		DHCPOFFER on 10.0.0.10 to xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (Eric-PC) via igb1
Oct 10 16:06:08	dhcpd		DHCPREQUEST for 10.0.0.10 (10.0.0.1) from xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (Eric-PC) via igb1
Oct 10 16:06:08	dhcpd		DHCPACK on 10.0.0.10 to xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx (Eric-PC) via igb1

Even when my computer pulls the DHCP IP from the disabled pool, it doesn't show up in the leases.

Yet it's disabled:

Should I just rebuild the network on the pfSense side of things as it definitely appears to be the culprit?

alienz

Looks like I was having the same issue these guys were having: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=112377.0

Restarting the DHCP service didn't fix the issue but rebooting the box did. Not sure why I didn't try that earlier, usually the go to thing for everything.

I'm guessing it's some sort of bug where pfSense continues to use part of the initial setup config regardless of being changed but I have no idea.

After rebooting, everything started working perfectly.

XeataOne

Just an update. I'm finding the same solution works in 2024. I have to reboot whenever I add a static DHCP if I want to see it in BIND. It's been this way for ever. I'd almost call it an unsolved bug (?)