>> Surely, if you misconfigure a relay agent in that way, around half your 
>> clients will initially be unable to renew their leases, but eventually 
>> will get serviced by the available server once their active lease has 
>> expired ? That would mean the clients would drop their network config 
>> momentarily before setting up a new one - meaning that active 
>> connections would drop, but new ones would connect just fine once the 
>> new settings are in place.
That's exactly how it tested it. I removed one relay and even the DISCOVER got 
dropped. I have checked the code and instead of some round robin, it's using a 
hashed hwaddress (or client id) and modulo function to always select the same 
server. If this server is not reachable, the customer has bad luck.

> In my network with Kea in load-balancing mode, there seems to be some sort of 
> algorithm involved even for DHCP DISCOVER, where only one of the two servers 
> responds with DHCP OFFER even though they are both running in a normal state. 
> It has been my assumption (untested) up to this point that Kea is using the 
> client's identifier (MAC address, DUID, etc.) to choose one or the other of 
> the active servers to respond to that DISCOVER. If that's true, and both 
> servers are in normal operation (neither is in partner-down), then that 
> algorithm would continue telling the second server to *not* respond to 
> requests from that client because it believes the other server will do so... 
> even if the other server is not receiving the client's requests.
That's the case.

> To summarize, that's what I assumed (against untested) 'max-unacked-clients' 
> is for; if the second server assumes the first server will respond to those 
> clients, but it does not (no leases are offered to them), it could notice the 
> situation and decide that the first server is unhealthy or partitioned and 
> force it into a 'down' state.
I also assumed that.

> So it would seem that an alternative to a load balancer is to script 
> detection of the problem and handle it according to the automation level 
> desired by the admin - at one extreme, simply alert it so manual intervention 
> can be done; at the other extreme, automatically put a server into 
> partner-down state.
That would be my Plan-B.




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