Would someone be kind enough to explain the DHCP process for me?
When is lease renewed? Are address taken from the pool in sequential order or does it always pull addresses from the top/bottom or random?
Is there a way to delete the dhcp lease when a user idle times out?
Can a lease be renewed if someone is still in the hotspot but in an idle state?
I have a network set so only 1 IP address can be assigned to a specific MAC address.
I have the network running at a time share property and I would prefer for users to only have to authenticate 1 time during their stay. Say I have an idle out of 2 hours and a lease of 12 hours. When the user (user a) is idle and the lease runs out but they are still active in the hotspot because they have not idled timed out. Another user (user b) comes along and acquires the IP that they used to have. User A is then unable to get online until either they time out or are kicked out of the hotspot.
I’m unable to set a session limit because I don’t want to arbitrarily knock someone off the internet.
I find my dhcp server assigns ip’s at seeming random ip’s
The lease is renewed after a disconnect/reconnect or when the lease expires. You can set the dhcp lease time in your dhcp server to whatever time. set a short lease time and your idle timeouts with remove the lease immidiatly.
I assume you are natting, so why be concearned, just make your IP pool bigger if you are running short.
We run 2 address-per-mac, plus allow a higher port-limit (concurrent user) - we find the resulting drop in support calls across the estate offsets any loss in revenue and also leaves clients happer that the system just works.
We don’t allow 2 IP’s per MAC because our monitoring servers when touching the equipment are for some reason pulling the DGW address and this takes all of our equipment offline untill the DGW address is removed from the host list.
I found that DHCP leases renew after 50% of the lease if the user is active.
I’ve since increased the DHCP leases to 3 days and the idle timeout to 24 hours. It’s worked great since, all but eliminating users need to log in unless they quit using the service for a full 24 hours.