Hi

Ive seen this has been posted a few time, but no answer.

I have a HotSpot , DHCP server is set up to assign lease for 2 hours.

However, users with out of range IP address are sitting in the IP POOL for 2 weeks, until there are no leases left and the hotspot fails. Ive disabled the IP POOL in the hotspot profile now, so it shouldn't do the universal ip translation thingy, however, I'm already starting to get a couple of strange IPs in the HotSpot hosts tab.

How do you set the lease time for the IP POOL or force it to use the DHCP server lease setting?

many thanks

You don't, as long as they are in your hosts table, they take up space. If they don't have a "valid" IP address I.E. they come in with a static address, the Hotspot service will assign them one from the pool. If you are running out of space, just increase the subnet size to something else. It's free address space and you can do whatever you want with it. We run with a /23 for most of our locations and have no problems with that, if you have more then that, there's no reason why you couldn't use a /22 or bigger.

Thank you Feklar

I'll switch to a /23. Surely though, its just a matter of time until even a /23 is exhausted if old clients are never removed?

People should start to clear out of the leases table as their lease expires, and then it can start to reuse the addresses. Sorry I didn't fully understand your original post.

As long as people don't pass traffic they expire out of the current table and free up a lease as long as they are set to. What are the devices/clients that are sitting there taking up a lease? It would sound to me like you got something weird setup on your hotspot if you have people that bring a device and connect to the network for 2+ weeks at a time. What is the idle timeout set to under the /ip hotspot? Mine is set to the default 5 minutes and it takes care of most situations.

DHCP lease is set to 2 hours.

However, there's clients sitting in the IP POOL (Not the DHCP lease) that are 14 days old and have not been used since. They tend to be HTC handsets.

/IP POOL USED is showing HotSpot as the owner (with active users being listed as DHCP owner)

Ive now removed the IP POOL option from the hotspot which is working as expected.

HotSpot sessions are clearing down fine.

Thanks to WifiGuy for help with this problem.

In the server section (ip / hotspot / servers) I modified the hotspot server (default called hotspot1) to show none for address pool, where the default setting was hs-pool-5 from when the hotspot was first created. The address pool specified in the user profile (also hs-pool-5) should not be changed.

In the pool used-addresses section, however, I see the opposite of what you said being true: The DHCP-owned addresses seem to be users who connected to the system but never logged in to the hotspot, or haven't logged in yet (inactive). The hotspot-owned addresses show up in the Active list in the hotspot.

Hotspot-authenticated addresses are apparently removed from the DHCP Server lease list and moved to the Hotspot active list. That would explain why the DHCP-owned addresses in the pool list are subject to different expiration periods; once an address is moved from the DHCP Server's lease list it is subject to the expiration rules of the hotspot only. This also means that setting a short 2-hour DHCP lease time in DHCP Server will only affect unauthenticated users, which is good.

I know this is an old post but it comes up in a google search so I feel I should post the solution here
Had the same problem, DHCP leases were expiring just fine but they were stuck in the IP Pool / Used Addresses section

Fix is simple. Go to IP Hotspot Servers and specify an idle timeout period, mine was blank. Set it to 3 days and suddenly all the stuck addresses free'd up