PC 's lose DHCP + DNS Issue

ericg101 · Jun 17, 2010, 1:35 PM

Hi guys,

Very new to the forum here, and after some vigorous searching, I couldn't find the problem I'm having.

I have a pfSense system set up for a simple home network running mostly windows machines.

The 1st issue is: All of the PC's on my network seem to lose their assigned IP adresses from DHCP and end up assigning themselves a 169.x.x.x after a few days. I need to disable and re-enable the card, or renew the DHCP lease. This only started happening when I switched to the pfsense machine. The following is what the logs show when this happens:

Jun 17 08:30:19 dnsmasq[19585]: bad name in /var/dhcpd/var/db/dhcpd.leases
Jun 17 08:29:50 kernel: arplookup 169.254.142.225 failed: host is not on local network
Jun 17 08:30:19 dnsmasq[19585]: reading /var/dhcpd/var/db/dhcpd.leases

The 2nd issue is: I cannot ping local devices on my network using their host name anymore. I have a feeling this has to do with the host and domain name that pfsense requires you to enter. If I ping for example "John", it will show "Pinging John.local (208.69.x.x)". How can I fix this so that it actually pings devices on my local network? This one might be real easy and i'm probably just missing a step somewhere… Any help would be greatly apreciated! Thanks again.

wallabybob · Jun 17, 2010, 10:22 PM

What version of fSense are you using?

Issue 1: Have you checked the pfSense DHCP log. Perhaps dhcpd has died and not been restarted. Are there any other clues to the reported bad name in /var/dhcpd/var/db/dhcpd.leases?

Issue 2: Does this happen before the DHCP lease renewal problem or after?