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When running isc-dhcp the leases file seems to grow indefinitely (several hundred MB). If I restart the isc-dhcp service, the file shrinks to 1.5MB.

How can I have isc-dhcp flush expired records periodically without restarting the full service?

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  • The documentation suggests dhcpd does this itself automatically, but at a frequency of its choosing. How long are your leases? Is there a good business reason not to just bounce the daemon?
    – MadHatter
    Sep 2, 2014 at 7:12
  • I use fairly short leases. I don't want to crontab a service restart, since truncating a large leases file seems to take a min - leaving the DHCP service off for the duration Sep 2, 2014 at 7:25
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    Is there a good reason not to use longer leases? That would prevent the file from growing so fast.
    – MadHatter
    Sep 2, 2014 at 7:42
  • It's only a workaround for DHCP scope running full. Sep 2, 2014 at 8:35
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    It's only a workaround if there's a business reason to use short leases; otherwise, you're running misconfigured, and upset that the daemon won't clean up after you.
    – MadHatter
    Sep 2, 2014 at 8:50

2 Answers 2

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As MadHatter mentioned in a comment, the leases file is periodically re-created to avoid this problem. While the period isn't mentioned in the documentation, discussions on the dhcp-users mailinglist indicates that it should be done once an hour, and I've checked the source code and found that this is correct.

Unfortunately this isn't a configurable option. In order to change it, you'd need to compile the dhcp server from source. In the file server/db.c you'd need to change the line

#define LEASE_REWRITE_PERIOD 3600

to the number of seconds you'd prefer.

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Check the answer to my question How do I purge dhcpd.leases. In my case the ownership of /var/lib/dhcp was root:root owing to a bug in isc-dhcp-server. Changing it to dhcpd:dhcpd fixes the problem temporarily, but it comes back when dhcpd restarts.

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