Environment
Novell DHCP
Novell Open Enterprise Server 2 (OES 2) Linux
Situation
While trying to setup DHCP with the failover option, the following errors are encountered when trying to start DHCP:
Could not decide if the server type is primary or secondary for failover peering. failover peer myFailoverPeerName: not found failover peer "myFailoverPeerName" LDAP: cannot parse dhcpService entry 'cn=myDHCP_Server,ou=mycontext,o=morecontext Configuration file errors encountered -- exiting
If the failover information is placed directly into the /etc/dhcpd.conf, then the service is able to load fine. It acts as if it cannot read or find the correlating edirectory objects.
Resolution
This is due to the host name, as found in the /etc/hosts file, being assigned to the loop back address. The IP address of the host name should either be assigned to the primary or secondary address (as configured under the failover peer under DHCP). The DHCP server gets this IP address from the /etc/hosts file by the 'gethostbyname' function and will then check whether it is the primary or secondary address for the failover peer. If there isn't a match then the 'peer not found' error is thrown. Make the changes as follows:
IE:
#127.0.0.1 myhost.mydomain.com myhost localhost
10.2.5.5 myhost.mydomain.com myhost localhost