DHCP message in syslog with 1.2 released

dtran · Mar 4, 2008, 5:20 PM

With 1.2 Released, I see the following message is the syslog.

dhcpd: Abandoning IP address x.x.x.x: declined.

Can someone tell me what it means and under what condition that message is produced.

Thanks

hoba · Mar 4, 2008, 5:40 PM

Found this via googlesearch:

"Before the DHCP server assigns an IP address to a client, it pings the address to make sure nobody is using it already. In this case, the test failed, so the server "abandons" the address and picks another one to assign. Another computer may have already had that IP address statically assigned, or maybe it was dynamically assigned but the server and that client miscommunicated.

In either case, it is a harmless message and no action is necessary."

Maybe you have some kind of device within your dhcp range that is manually configured and conflicts with the dhcp range?

dtran · Mar 4, 2008, 6:33 PM

Great and thanks again for the quick response.
After some searches, I believe the message is harmless as you've pointed out.

In our case, we set our dhcp lease to a very short period (600 sec - 10min), so the client machine may be in sleep mode/power save mode and wake up trying to use the previous assigned IP and hence the system rejects it.