[This isn't strictly a Solaris admin question, sorry.]

We're using Sun's DHCP server to provide config to a bunch of Windows
clients. This isn't any kind of HA environment - they're desktop boxes
which can be rebooted, though it would be a pain to reboot them all.
Currently we have a single DHCP server which is due to be retired.
I'm planning on having a pair of boxes which have DHCP servers
configured (identically) on them. If the live box goes down we'd then
start the server on the other one.

The question is: do I need to worry about keeping the DHCP tables
coherent between the boxes (bearing in mind that this is *not* an HA
environment)? My initial guess was that I don't: clients will just
ask to renew their current addresses, and the new box will pick up the
allocations that way. I think it won't hand out duplicate addresses
because it will ping before handing out an address and will find a
machine responding. The bad case is if some machine is temporarily
unresponsive when it won't respond to the ping & will then get unhappy
later. This will probably be few machines though and I can live with
that, especially as we're expecting server failure to be a rare event
(they're reasonably redundant machines).

But perhaps I am confused about things...

--tim