Network Working Group Ralph Droms INTERNET DRAFT Bucknell University Kim Kinnear Mark Stapp Cisco Systems Bernie Volz IPWorks Steve Gonczi Network Engines Greg Rabil Mike Dooley Arun Kapur Lucent Technologies July 2000 Expires January 2001 DHCP Failover Protocol Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is in full conformance with all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet- Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 1] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 Copyright Notice Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2000). All Rights Reserved. Abstract DHCP [RFC 2131] allows for multiple servers to be operating on a single network. Some sites are interested in running multiple servers in such a way so as to provide redundancy in case of server failure. In order for this to work reliably, the cooperating primary and secondary servers must maintain a consistent database of the lease information. This implies that servers will need to coordinate any and all lease activity so that this information is synchronized in case of failover. This document defines a protocol to provide such synchronization between two servers. One server is designated the "primary" server, the other is the "secondary" server. This document also describes a way to integrate the failover protocol with the DHCP load balancing approach. This document is a substantial reorganization as well as a technical and editorial revision of draft-ietf-dhc-failover-05.txt. Table of Contents 1. Introduction................................................. 4 2. Terminology.................................................. 5 2.1. Requirements terminology................................... 5 2.2. DHCP and failover terminology.............................. 5 3. Background and External Requirements......................... 9 3.1. Key aspects of the DHCP protocol........................... 9 3.2. BOOTP relay agent implementation........................... 11 3.3. What does it mean if a server can't communicate with its partner? 12 3.4. Challenging scenarios for a Failover protocol.............. 12 3.5. Using TCP to detect partner server failure................. 14 4. Design Goals................................................. 15 4.1. Design goals for this protocol............................. 15 4.2. Limitations of this protocol............................... 16 5. Protocol Overview............................................ 17 5.1. Messages and States........................................ 17 5.2. Fundamental guarantees..................................... 20 5.3. Load balancing............................................. 26 5.4. Operating in NORMAL state.................................. 27 5.5. Operating in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state.............. 27 5.6. Operating in PARTNER-DOWN state............................ 28 Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 2] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 5.7. Operating in RECOVER state................................. 28 5.8. Operating in STARTUP state................................. 28 5.9. Time synchronization between servers....................... 28 5.10. IP address binding-status................................. 29 5.11. DNS dynamic update considerations......................... 33 5.12. Reservations and failover................................. 37 5.13. Dynamic BOOTP and failover................................ 39 5.14. Guidelines for selecting MCLT............................. 39 6. Common Message Format........................................ 40 6.1. Message header format...................................... 40 6.2. Common option format....................................... 43 6.3. Batching multiple binding update transactions in one BNDUPD mes- 44 7. Protocol Messages............................................ 46 7.1. BNDUPD message [3]......................................... 46 7.2. BNDACK message [4]......................................... 56 7.3. UPDREQ message [9]......................................... 59 7.4. UPDREQALL message [7]...................................... 60 7.5. UPDDONE message [8]........................................ 61 7.6. POOLREQ message [1]........................................ 62 7.7. POOLRESP message [2]....................................... 63 7.8. CONNECT message [5]........................................ 64 7.9. CONNECTACK message [6]..................................... 68 7.10. STATE message [10]........................................ 71 7.11. CONTACT message [11]...................................... 72 7.12. DISCONNECT message [12]................................... 73 8. Connection Management........................................ 74 8.1. Connection granularity..................................... 74 8.2. Creating the TCP connection................................ 74 8.3. Using the TCP connection for determining communications status 76 8.4. Using the TCP connection for binding data.................. 78 8.5. Using the TCP connection for control messages.............. 78 8.6. Losing the TCP connection.................................. 78 9. Failover Endpoint States..................................... 79 9.1. Server Initialization...................................... 79 9.2. Server State Transitions................................... 79 9.3. STARTUP state.............................................. 82 9.4. PARTNER-DOWN state......................................... 84 9.5. RECOVER state.............................................. 86 9.6. NORMAL state............................................... 89 9.7. COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED State........................... 91 9.8. POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state................................... 95 9.9. RESOLUTION-INTERRUPTED state............................... 96 9.10. RECOVER-DONE state........................................ 97 9.11. PAUSED state.............................................. 98 9.12. SHUTDOWN state............................................ 98 10. Safe Period................................................. 99 11. Security.................................................... 101 Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 3] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 11.1. Simple shared secret...................................... 101 11.2. TLS....................................................... 102 12. Failover Options............................................ 103 12.1. addresses-transferred..................................... 103 12.2. assigned-IP-address....................................... 103 12.3. binding-status............................................ 104 12.4. client-identifier......................................... 104 12.5. client-hardware-address................................... 105 12.6. client-last-transaction-time.............................. 105 12.7. client-reply-options...................................... 105 12.8. client-request-options.................................... 106 12.9. DDNS...................................................... 107 12.10. delayed-service-parameter................................ 108 12.11. hash-bucket-assignment................................... 108 12.12. lease-expiration-time.................................... 108 12.13. max-unacked-bndupd....................................... 109 12.14. MCLT..................................................... 109 12.15. message.................................................. 109 12.16. message-digest........................................... 110 12.17. potential-expiration-time................................ 110 12.18. receive-timer............................................ 110 12.19. protocol-version......................................... 111 12.20. reject-reason............................................ 112 12.21. sending-server-IP-address................................ 113 12.22. server-flags............................................. 113 12.23. server-state............................................. 114 12.24. start-time-of-state...................................... 114 12.25. TLS-reply................................................ 115 12.26. TLS-request.............................................. 115 12.27. vendor-class-identifier.................................. 115 12.28. vendor-specific-options.................................. 116 13. IANA Considerations......................................... 116 14. Acknowledgments............................................. 116 15. References.................................................. 118 16. Author's information........................................ 119 17. Full Copyright Statement.................................... 120 1. Introduction DHCP [RFC 2131] allows for multiple servers to be operating on a sin- gle network. Some sites are interested in running multiple servers in such a way so as to provide redundancy in case of server failure since the DHCP subsystem is in many cases a critical part of the net- work infrastructure. This document defines a protocol to provide synchronization between two servers in order that each can take over for the other should Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 4] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 either one fail or become unreachable. One server is designated the "primary" server, the other is the "secondary" server, and most DHCP client requests are sent to each server (see Section 3.1.1 for details). In order to provide a high availability DHCP service, these cooperating primary and secondary servers must maintain a consistent database of lease information. This implies that servers will need to coordinate all lease activity so that this information is syn- chronized in case failover is required. The protocol messages and processing techniques required to maintain a consistent database are specified in the protocol described here. The failover protocol also contains a way to integrate the DHCP load- balancing algorithm described in [LOADB] with the failover protocol. 2. Terminology This section discusses both the generic requirements terminology com- mon to many IETF protocol specifications as well as specialized DHCP and failover protocol specific terminology. 2.1. Requirements terminology The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 [RFC 2119]. 2.2. DHCP and failover terminology This document uses the following terms: o "binding" A binding is a collection of configuration parameters, includ- ing at least an IP address, associated with or "bound to" a DHCP client. Bindings are managed by DHCP servers. o "binding database" The collection of bindings managed by a primary and secondary. o "binding update transaction" A binding update transaction refers to the set of information (contained in options) necessary to perform a binding update Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 5] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 for a single IP address. It will be comprised of the assigned-IP-address option and the binding-status option, along other options as appropriate. o "binding-status" The binding-status is the status of an IP address with respect to its association with a client. There are specific binding- status values defined for use by the failover protocol, e.g., ACTIVE, FREE, RELEASED, ABANDONED, etc. These are designed to map more or less directly onto the binding-status values used internally in most DHCP server implementations. The term binding-status refers to the concept also sometimes known as "lease state" or "IP address state", but in this document the term "state" is reserved for the failover state of a failover endpoint, and binding-status is always used to refer to the state associated with an IP address or lease. o "DHCP client" or "client" A DHCP client is an Internet host using DHCP to obtain confi- guration parameters such as a network address. The term "client" used within this document always means a DHCP client, and never one of the two failover servers. o "DHCP server" or "server" A DHCP server is an Internet host that returns configuration parameters to DHCP clients. o "DDNS" An abbreviation for "Dynamic DNS", which refers to the capabil- ity to update a DNS server's name (actually resource record) database using an on-the-wire protocol defined in [RFC 2136]. o "DNS" An abbreviation for "Domain Name System", a scheme where a cen- tral name repository is used to map names to IP addresses and IP addresses to names. o "failover endpoint" The failover protocol allows for there to be a unique failover endpoint per partner per role (where role is primary or secon- dary). This failover endpoint can take actions and hold unique states. There are thus a maximum of two failover endpoints per Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 6] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 server per partner (one for each partner as a primary and one for that same partner as a secondary.) o "FQDN" An FQDN is a "fully qualified domain name". A fully qualified domain name generally is a host name with at least one zone name, for example "www.dhcp.org" is a fully qualified domain name. o "lazy update" Lazy update refers to the requirement placed on a server imple- menting a failover protocol to update its failover partner when- ever the binding database changes. A failover protocol which didn't support lazy update would require the failover partner update to be complete before a DHCP server could respond to a DHCP client request with a DHCPACK. A failover protocol which does support lazy update places no such restriction on the update of the failover partner server, and so a server can allo- cate an IP address or extend a lease on an IP address and then update its failover partner as time permits. A failover proto- col which supports lazy update not only removes the requirement to update the failover partner prior to responding to a DHCP client with a DHCPACK, but also allows gathering up batches of updates from one failover server to its partner. o "MCLT" The MCLT refers to maximum client lead time. This time is con- figured on the primary server and transmitted from the primary to the secondary server in the CONNECT message. It is the max- imum amount of time that one server can extend a lease for a client's binding beyond the time known by the partner server. See section 5.2.1 for details. o "partner" A "partner", for the purposes of this document, refers to a failover server, typically the other failover server. In many (if not most) cases, the failover protocol is symmetric with respect to the primary or secondary nature of the servers, and so it is often appropriate to discuss "updating the partner server", since it could be a primary server updating a secondary server or a secondary server updating a primary server. o "Primary server" or "Primary" Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 7] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 A DHCP server configured to provide primary service to a set of DHCP clients for a particular set of subnet address pools. o "RR" "RR" is an abbreviation for "resource record". All records in the DNS are resource records. The resource records of most relevance to this document are the "A" resource record, which maps a DNS name to a particular IP address, the "PTR" resource record, which allows a "reverse map", from the IP address back to a DNS name, and the "KEY" resource record, which is used in ways defined in [DDNS] to tag a DNS name with the identity of the DHCP client with which it is associated. o "Secondary server" or "Secondary" A DHCP server configured to act as backup to a primary server for a particular set of subnet address pools. o "stable storage" Every DHCP server is assumed to have some form of what is called "stable storage". Stable storage is used to hold information concerning IP address bindings (among other things) so that this information is not lost in the event of a server failure which requires restart of the server. o "state" In this document, the term "state" refers exclusively to the state of a failover endpoint, for example: NORMAL, COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED, PARTNER-DOWN. It is not used to refer to any attributes of an IP address or a binding of an IP address. See "binding-status". o "subnet address pool" A subnet address pool is the set of IP addresses which is asso- ciated with a particular network number and subnet mask. In the simple case, there is a single network number and subnet mask and a set of IP addresses. In the more complex case (sometimes called "secondary subnets", sometimes "superscopes"), several (apparently unrelated) network number and subnet mask combina- tions with their associated IP addresses may all be configured together into one subnet address pool. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 8] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 3. Background and External Requirements This section highlights key aspects of the DHCP protocol on which the failover protocol depends. It also discusses the requirements that the failover protocol places on other aspects of the network infras- tructure, and some general issues surrounding server failure detec- tion. Some failure scenarios that provide particular challenges to a failover protocol are discussed. Finally, the challenges inherent in using a TCP connection as a means to detect failure of a partner server are elaborated. 3.1. Key aspects of the DHCP protocol The failover protocol is designed to augment the DHCP protocol as described in RFC 2131 [RFC 2131]. There are several key aspects of the DHCP protocol which are required by the failover protocol in order to successfully meet its design goals. 3.1.1. Broadcast behavior There are two aspects of the broadcast behavior of the DHCP protocol which are key to making the failover protocol operate successfully. The first is simply that the DHCP protocol requires a DHCP client to broadcast all DHCPDISCOVER and DHCPREQUEST/INIT-REBOOT messages. Because of this requirement, a DHCP client who was communicating with one server will automatically be able to communicate with another server if one is available. The second aspect of broadcast behavior is similar to the first, but involves the distinction between a DHCPREQUEST/RENEW and DHCPREQUEST/REBINDING. A DHCPREQUEST/RENEW is the message that a DHCP client uses to extend its lease. It is unicast to the DHCP server from which it acquired the lease. However, the DHCP protocol (in a farsighted move), was explicitly designed so that in the event that a DHCP client cannot contact the server from which it received a lease on an IP address using a DHCPREQUEST/RENEW, the client is required to broadcast its renewal using a DHCPREQUEST/REBINDING to any available DHCP server. Since all DHCP clients were required to implement this algorithm, the failover protocol can have a different server from the one that initially granted a lease be the server to renew a lease. Thus, one server can take over for another with no interruption in the service as experienced by the DHCP client or its associated applications software. 3.1.2. Client responsibility In the DHCP protocol the DHCP clients are entrusted with a consider- able responsibility. In particular, after they are granted a lease Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 9] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 on an IP address, they are enjoined to only use that IP address while their lease is valid. Every DHCP client is expected to stop using an IP address if the expiration time on the lease has passed and if it cannot get an extension on the lease for that IP address from some DHCP server. Thus, the correct behavior of every DHCP client in this regard is required to ensure the integrity of the DHCP service. On the other hand, incorrect behavior by a client in this area will tend to adversely affect at most one other DHCP client. Furthermore, any DHCP client which sends in a DHCPREQUEST/RENEW or DHCPREQUEST/REBINDING to a DHCP server (either unicast for a RENEW or broadcast for a REBINDING) MUST still have time to run on the lease for that IP address. The DHCP server sends the DHCPACK back unicast to the IP address from which the RENEW or REBINDING originated. Given the existing responsibility placed on the client to only use an IP address when the lease is valid, and to only send in a RENEW or REBINDING if the lease is valid, the failover protocol relies on DHCP clients to perform responsibly and will, in the absence of conflict- ing information, believe a DHCP client that is attempting to RENEW or REBIND a lease on an IP address is the legitimate owner of that IP address. If clients do not follow these rules, it is possible for an address to be in use by more than one client. For a single server, this hap- pens because the server has leased the expired address to another client and the original client is also attempting to use the address. The server would NAK the renewal request. This is made slightly worse in the failover protocol if the two servers are unable to communicate with each other and one server leases an available address to a new client while the other server receives a renewal from a different client. In this case, both servers lease the same address to dif- ferent clients for the MCLT time. One troublesome issue is that of the DHCP client responsibility when sending in DHCPREQUEST/INIT-REBOOT requests. While the original DHCP RFC was written to require a DHCP client to have time left to run on the lease for an IP address if the client is sending an INIT-REBOOT request, it was sufficiently unclear that some client vendors didn't realize this until recently. Since the INIT-REBOOT request was sent with the IP address in the dhcp-requested-address option and not in the ciaddr (for perfectly good reasons), the similarity to the RENEW and REBINDING case was lost on many people. At present, the failover protocol does not assume that a client send- ing in an INIT-REBOOT request necessarily has a valid lease on the IP address appearing in the dhcp-requested-address option in the INIT- REBOOT request. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 10] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 The implications of this are as follows: Assume that there is a DHCP client that gets a lease from one server while that server is unable to communicate with its failover partner. Then, assume that after that client reboots it is able only to communicate with the other failover server. If the failover servers have not been able to com- municate with each other during this process, then the DHCP client will get a new IP address instead of being able to continue to use its existing IP address. This will affect no applications on the DHCP client, since it is rebooting. However, it will use up an additional IP address in this marginal case. 3.1.3. Stable storage update before DHCPACK The DHCP protocol allocates resources, and in order to operate correctly it requires that a DHCP server update some form of stable storage prior to sending a DHCPACK to a DHCP client in order to grant that client a lease on an IP address. One of the goals of the failover protocol is that it not add signifi- cant additional time to this already time consuming requirement to update stable storage prior to a DHCPACK. In particular, adding a requirement to communicate with another server prior to sending a DHCPACK would greatly simplify the failover protocol, but it would unacceptably limit the potential scalability of any DHCP server which employed the failover protocol. 3.2. BOOTP relay agent implementation Many DHCP clients are not resident on the same network segment as a DHCP server. In order to support this form of network architecture, most contemporary routers implement something known as a BOOTP Relay Agent. This capability inside of a router listens for all broadcasts at the DHCP port, port 67, and will relay any broadcasts that it receives on to a DHCP server. The IP address of the DHCP server must have been previously configured into the router. As part of the relay process, the relay agent will place the address of the inter- face on which it received the broadcast into the giaddr field of the DHCP packet. Since the failover protocol requires two DHCP servers to receive any broadcast DHCP messages, in order to work with DHCP clients which are not local to the DHCP server, the BOOTP relay agent on the router closest to the DHCP client must be configured to point at more than one DHCP server. Most BOOTP relay agent implementations allow this duplication of packets. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 11] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 If this is not possible, an administrator might be able to configure the relay agent with a subnet broadcast address, but in this case the primary and secondary DHCP servers in a failover pair must both reside on the same subnet. 3.3. What does it mean if a server can't communicate with its partner? In any protocol designed to allow one server to take over some responsibilities from a partner server in the event of "failure" of that partner server, there is an inherent difficulty in determining when that partner server has failed. In fact, it is fundamentally impossible for one server to distinguish a network communications failure from the outright failure of the server to which it is trying to communicate. In the case where each server is handing out resources (in this case IP addresses) to a client community, mistaking an inability to communicate with a partner server for failure of that partner server could easily cause both servers to be handing out the same IP addresses to different clients. One way that this is sometimes handled is for there to be more than two servers. In the case of an odd number of servers, the servers that can still communicate with a majority of other servers will con- sider themselves operational, and any server which can't communicate to a majority of other servers must immediately cease operations. While this technique works in some domains, having the only server to which a DHCP client can communicate voluntarily shut itself down seems like something worth avoiding. The failover protocol will operate correctly while both servers are unable to communicate, whether they are both running or not. At some point there may be resource contention, and if one of the servers is actually down, then the operator can inform the operational server and the operational server will be able to use all of the failed server's resources. The protocol also allows detection of an orderly shutdown of a parti- cipating server. 3.4. Challenging scenarios for a Failover protocol There exist two failure scenarios which provide particular challenges to the correctness guarantees of a failover protocol. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 12] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 3.4.1. Primary Server crash before "lazy" update: In the case where the primary server sends a DHCPACK to a client for a newly allocated IP address and then crashes prior to sending the corresponding update to the secondary server, the secondary server will have no record of the IP address allocation. When the secondary server takes over, it may well try to allocate that IP address to a different client. In the case where the first client to receive the IP address is not on the net at the time (yet while there was still time to run on its lease), an ICMP echo (i.e., ping) will not prevent the secondary server from allocating that IP address to a different client. The failover protocol deals with this situation by having the primary and secondary servers allocate addresses for new clients from dis- joint address pools. See section 5.4 for details. A more likely (in that DHCPRENEWs are presumably more common than DHCPDISCOVERs) and more subtle version of this problem is where the primary server crashes after extending a client's lease time, and before updating the secondary with a new time using a lazy update. After the secondary takes over, if the client is not connected to the network the secondary will believe the client's lease has expired when, in fact, it has not. In this case as well, the IP address might be reallocated to a different client while the first client is still using it. This scenario is handled by the failover protocol through control of the lease time and the use of the maximum client lead time (MCLT). See section 5.2.1 for details. 3.4.2. Network partition where DHCP servers can't communicate but each can talk to clients: Several conditions are required for this situation to occur. First, due to a network failure, the primary and secondary servers cannot communicate. As well, some of the DHCP clients must be able to com- municate with the primary server, and some of the clients must now only be able to communicate with the secondary server. When this condition occurs, both primary and secondary servers could attempt to allocate IP addresses for new clients from the same pool of available addresses. At some point, then, two clients will end up being allo- cated the same IP address. This will cause problems when the network failure that created this situation is corrected. The failover protocol deals with this situation by having the primary and secondary servers allocate addresses for new clients from dis- joint address pools. See section 5.4 for details. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 13] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 3.5. Using TCP to detect partner server failure There are several characteristics of TCP that are important to the functioning of the failover protocol, which uses one TCP connection for both bulk data transfer as well as to assess communications integrity with the other server. Reliable and ordered message delivery are chief among these important characteristics. It would be nice to use the capabilities built in to TCP to allow it to determine if communications integrity exists to the failover partner but this strategy contains some problems which require analysis. There exist three fundamental cases for an open TCP con- nection that must be examined. 1. When no data is being sent then no messages are traveling across the TCP connection. 2. When data is queued to be sent, and the receiver has not blocked the sending of additional data, then messages are flowing across the TCP connection containing the applications data. 3. When data is queued to be sent, and the receiver has blocked the transmission of additional data, then persist messages are flowing from the receiver to the sender to ensure that the sender doesn't miss the receiver opening the window for further transmissions. The first case can be turned into the second case by sending application-level keep-alive messages periodically when there is no other data queued to be sent. Note TCP keep-alive messages might be used as well, but they present additional problems. Thus, we can ensure that the TCP connection has messages flowing periodically across the connection fairly easily. The question remains as to what TCP will do if the other end of the connection fails to respond (either because of network partition or because the receiving server crashes). TCP will attempt to retransmit a message with an exponential backoff, and will eventually timeout that retransmission. However, the length of that timeout cannot, in gen- eral, be set on a per-connection basis, and is frequently as long as nine minutes, though in some cases it may be as short as two minutes. On some systems it can be set system-wide, while on other systems it cannot be changed at all. A value for this timeout that would be appropriate for the failover protocol, say less than 1 minute, could have unpleasant side-effects on other applications running on the same server, assuming that it Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 14] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 could be changed at all on the host operating system. Nine minutes is a long time for the DHCP service to be unavailable to any new clients that were being served by the server which has crashed, when there is another server running that could respond to them as soon as it determines that its partner is not operational. The conclusion drawn from this analysis is that TCP provides very useful support for the failover protocol in the areas of reliable and ordered message delivery, but cannot by itself be relied upon to detect partner server failure in a fashion acceptable to the needs of the failover protocol. Additional failover protocol capabilities have been created to support timely detection of partner server failure. See section 8.3 for details on this mechanism. 4. Design Goals This section lists the design goals and the limitations of the fail- over protocol. 4.1. Design goals for this protocol The following is a list of goals that are met by this protocol. They are listed in priority order. 1. Implementations of this protocol must work with existing DHCP client implementations based on the DHCP protocol [1]. 2. Implementations of the protocol must work with existing BOOTP relay agent implementations. 3. The protocol must provide failover redundancy between servers that are not located on the same subnet. 4. Provide for continued service to DHCP clients through an automated mechanism in the event of failure of the primary server. 5. Avoid binding an IP address to a client while that binding is currently valid for another client. In other words, do not allocate the same IP address to two clients. 6. Minimize any need for manual administrative intervention. 7. Introduce no additional delays in server response time as a result of the network communications required to implement the failover protocol, i.e., don't require communications with the partner between the receipt of a DHCPREQUEST and the Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 15] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 corresponding DHCPACK. 8. Share IP address ranges between primary and secondary servers; i.e., impose no requirement that the pool of available addresses be manually or permanently divided between servers. 9. Continue to meet the goals and objectives of this protocol in the event of server failure or network partition. 10. Provide graceful reintegration of full protocol service after server failure or network partition. 11. Allow for one computer to act as a secondary server for multi- ple primary servers. The protocol must allow failover primary and secondary configuration choices to be made at a granular- ity smaller than "all of the subnets served by a single server", though individual implementations may not choose to allow such flexibility. 12. Ensure that an existing client can keep its existing IP address binding if it can communicate with either the primary or secondary DHCP server implementing this protocol - not just whichever server that originally offered it the binding. 13. Ensure that a new client can get an IP address from some server. Ensure that in the face of partition, where servers continue to run but cannot communicate with each other, the above goals and requirements may be met. In addition, when the partition condition is removed, allow graceful automatic re-integration without requiring human intervention. 14. If either primary or secondary server loses all of the infor- mation that it has stored in stable storage, ensure that it be able to refresh its stable storage from the other server. 15. Support load balancing between the primary and secondary servers, and allow configuration of the percentage of the client population served by each with a moderately fine granu- larity. 4.2. Limitations of this protocol The following are explicit limitations of this protocol. 1. This protocol provides only one level of redundancy through a single secondary server for each primary server. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 16] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 2. A subset of the address pool is reserved for secondary server use. In order to handle the failure case where both servers are able to communicate with DHCP clients, but unable to com- municate with each other, a subset of the IP address pool must be set aside as a private address pool for the secondary server. The secondary can use these to service newly arrived DHCP clients during such a period. The required size of this private pool is based only on the arrival rate of new DHCP clients and the length of expected downtime, and is not influ- enced in any way by the total number of DHCP clients supported by the server pair. The failover protocol can be used in a mode where both the primary and secondary servers can share the load between them when both are operating. In this load balancing mode, the addresses allocated by the primary server to the secondary server are not unused, but are used instead to service the portion of the client base to which the secondary server is required to respond. See section 5.3 for more information on load balancing. 3. The primary and secondary servers do not respond to client requests at all while recovering from a failure that could have resulted in duplicate IP assignments. (When synchroniz- ing in POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state). 5. Protocol Overview This section will discuss the failover protocol at a relatively high level of detail. In the event that a description in this section conflicts (or appears to conflict due to the overview nature of this section) with information in later sections of this draft, the infor- mation in the later sections should be considered authoritative. 5.1. Messages and States This protocol is centered around the message exchange used by one server to update the other server of binding database changes result- ing from DHCP client activity: o Communication of binding database changes The binding update (BNDUPD) message is used to send the binding database changes to the partner server, and the partner server responds with a binding acknowledgement (BNDACK) message when it has successfully committed those changes to its own stable storage. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 17] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 All of the other messages involve ancillary issues: o Management of available IP addresses The pool request (POOLREQ) is used by the secondary server to request an allocation of IP addresses from the primary server. The pool response (POOLRESP) is used by the primary server to inform the secondary server how many IP addresses were allocated to the secondary server as the result of the pool request. o Synchronization of the binding databases between the servers after they've been out of communications The update request (UPDREQ) message is used by one server to request that its partner send it all binding database informa- tion that it has not already seen. The update request all (UPDREQALL) message is used by one server to request that all binding database information be sent in order to recover from a total loss of its binding database by the requesting server. The update done (UPDDONE) message is used by the responding server to indicate that all requested updates have been sent the responding server and acked by the requesting server. o Connection establishment The connect (CONNECT) message is used by the primary server to establish a high level connection with the other server, and to transmit several important configuration data items between the servers. The connect acknowledgement message (CONNECTACK) is used by the secondary server to respond to a CONNECT message from the primary server. The disconnect (DISCONNECT) message is used by either server when closing a connection. o Server synchronization The state change (STATE) message is used by either server to inform the other server of a change of failover state. o Connection integrity management The contact (CONTACT) message is used by either server to ensure that the other server continues to see the connection as opera- tional. It MUST be transmitted periodically over every esta- blished connection if other message traffic is not flowing, and it MAY be sent at any time. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 18] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 5.1.1. Failover endpoints The proper operation of the failover protocol requires more than the transmission of messages between one server and the other. Each end- point might seem to be a single DHCP server, but in fact there are many situations where additional flexibility in configuration is use- ful. For instance, there might be several servers which are each primary for a distinct set of address pools, and one server which is secon- dary for all of those address pools. The situation with the pri- maries is straightforward, but the secondary will need to maintain a separate failover state, partner state, and communications up/down status for each of the separate primary servers for which it is act- ing as a secondary. The failover protocol calls for there to be a unique failover end- point per partner per role (where role is primary or secondary). This failover endpoint can take actions and hold unique states. There are thus a maximum of two failover endpoints per partner (one for the partner as a primary and one for that same partner as a secondary.) Thus, in the case where there are two primary servers A and B each backed up by a single common secondary server C, there is one fail- over endpoint on each of A and B, and two different failover end- points on C. The two different failover endpoints on C each have unique states and independent TCP connections. This document frequently describes the behavior of the protocol in terms of primary and secondary servers, not primary and secondary failover endpoints. However, it is important to remember that every 'server' described in this document is in reality a failover endpoint that resides in a particular process, and that many failover end- points may reside in the same process. It is not the case that there is a unique failover endpoint for each subnet address pool that participates in a failover relationship. On one server, there is one failover endpoint per partner per role, regardless of how many subnet address pools are managed by that com- bination of partner and role. Conversely, on a particular server, any given subnet address pool will be associated with exactly one failover endpoint. When a connection is received from the partner, the unique failover endpoint to which the message is directed is determined solely by the IP address of the partner and the port to which the connection is directed by the partner. See section 8.2. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 19] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 5.2. Fundamental guarantees There a several fundamental restrictions this protocol places on what one server can do in the absence of knowledge of the other server. Operating within these restrictions allows certain guarantees to be made to the partner server, and these are key to the correct opera- tion of the protocol. 5.2.1. Control of lease time The key problem with lazy update is that when a server fails after updating a client with a particular lease time and before updating its partner, the partner will believe that a lease has expired even though the client still retains a valid lease on that IP address. In order to handle this problem, a period of time known as the "Max- imum Client Lead Time" (MCLT) is defined and must be known to both the primary and secondary servers. Proper use of this time interval places an upper bound on the difference allowed between the lease time provided to a DHCP client by a server and the lease time known by that server's partner. However, the MCLT is typically much less than the lease time that a server has been configured to offer a client, and so some strategy must exist to allow a server to offer the configured lease time to a client. During a lazy update the updating server typically updates its partner with a potential expiration time which is longer than the lease time previously given to the client and which is longer than the lease time that the server has been configured to give a client. This allows that server to give a longer lease time to the client the next time the client renews its lease, since the time that it will give to the client will not exceed the MCLT beyond the potential expiration time acknowledged by its partner. The PARTNER-DOWN state exists so that a server can be sure that its partner is, indeed, down. Correct operation while in that state requires (generally) that the server wait the MCLT after anything that happened prior to its transition into PARTNER-DOWN state (or, more accurately, when the other server went down if that is known). Thus, the server MUST wait the MCLT after the partner server went down before allocating any of the partner's addresses which were available for allocation. In the event the partner was not in com- munication prior to going down, it might have allocated one or more of its FREE addresses to a DHCP client and been unable to inform the server entering PARTNER-DOWN prior to going down itself. By waiting the MCLT after the time the partner went down, the server in PARTNER-DOWN state ensures that any clients which have a lease on one of the partner's FREE addresses will either time out or contact the server in PARTNER-DOWN by the time that period ends. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 20] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 In addition, once a server has transitioned to PARTNER-DOWN state, it MUST NOT reallocate an IP address from one client to another client until an additional MCLT interval after the lease by the original client expires. (Actually, until the maximum client lead time after what it believes to be the lease expiration time of the client.) Some optimizations exist for this restriction, in that it only applies to leases that were issued BEFORE entering PARTNER-DOWN. Once a server has entered PARTNER-DOWN and it leases out an address, it need not wait this time as long as it has never communicated with the partner since the lease was given out. The fundamental relationship on which much of the correctness of this protocol depends is that the lease expiration time known to a DHCP client MUST NOT be more than the maximum client lead time greater than the potential expiration time known to a server's partner. The remainder of this section makes the above fundamental relation- ship more explicit. This protocol requires a DHCP server to deal with several different lease intervals and places specific restrictions on their relation- ships. The purpose of these restrictions is to allow the other server in the pair to be able to make certain assumptions in the absence of an ability to communicate between servers. The different lease times are: o desired lease interval The desired lease interval is the lease interval that a DHCP server would like to give to a DHCP client in the absence of any restrictions imposed by the Failover protocol. Its determina- tion is outside of the scope of this protocol. Typically this is the result of external configuration of a DHCP server. o actual lease interval The actual lease internal is the lease interval that a DHCP server gives out to a DHCP client in the dhcp-lease-time option of a DHCPACK packet. It may be shorter than the desired client lease interval (as explained below). o potential lease interval The potential lease interval is the lease expiration interval the local server tells to its partner in the potential- expiration-time option of a BNDUPD message. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 21] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 o acknowledged potential lease interval The acknowledged potential lease interval is the potential lease interval the partner server has most recently acknowledged in the potential-expiration-time option of a BNDACK message. The key restriction (and guarantee) that any server makes with respect to lease intervals is that the actual client lease interval never exceeds the acknowledged potential lease interval (if any) by more than a fixed amount. This fixed amount is called the "Maximum Client Lead Time" (MCLT). The MCLT MAY be configurable on the primary server, but for correct server operation it MUST be the same and known to both the primary and secondary servers. The secondary server determines the MCLT from the MCLT option sent from the primary server to the secondary server in the CONNECT message. A server MUST record in its stable storage both the actual lease interval and the most recently acknowledged potential lease interval for each IP address binding. It is assumed that the desired client lease interval can be determined through techniques outside of the scope of this protocol. See section 7.1.5 for more details concern- ing the times that the server MUST record in its stable storage and the way that they interact with the lease time that may be offered to a DHCP client. Again, the fundamental relationship among these times which MUST be maintained is: actual lease interval < ( acknowledged potential lease interval + MCLT ) Figure 5.2.1-1 illustrates an initial lease to a client using the rules discussed in the example which follows it. Note that this is only one example -- as long as the fundamental relationship is preserved, the actual times used could be quite different. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 22] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 DHCP Primary Secondary time Client Server Server | (time in intervals) | (absolute time) | | | | | >-DHCPDISCOVER-> | | | <---DHCPOFFER-< | | | | | | >-DHCPREQUEST-> | | | (selecting) | | | | | t | <--------DHCPACK-< | | | lease-time=MCLT | | | | >-BNDUPD--> | | | lease-expiration=t+MCLT | | potential-expiration=t+(MCLT/2)+X | | | | | <-BNDACK-< | | | potential-expiration=t+(MCLT/2)+X ... ... ... | | | t+MCLT/2 | >-DHCPREQUEST-> | | | (renew) | | | | | t1 | <--------DHCPACK-< | | | lease-time=X | | | | >-BNDUPD--> | | | lease-expiration=t1+X | | potential-expiration=t1+(X/2)+X | | | | | <-BNDACK-< | | | potential-expiration=t1+(X/2)+X ... ... ... Figure 5.2.1-1: Lazy Update Message Traffic X = Desired Lease Interval Assumes renewal interval = lease interval / 2 DISCUSSION: This protocol mandates only that the above fundamental relation- ship concerning lease intervals is preserved. In the interests of clarity, however, let's examine a specific example. The MCLT in this case is 1 hour. The desired lease interval is 3 days, and its renewal time is half the lease Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 23] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 interval. The rules for this example are: o What to tell the client: Take the remainder of the acknowledged potential lease interval. If this is a new lease, then this value will be zero. If this remainder plus the MCLT is greater than the desired lease inter- val, give the client the desired lease interval else give the client the remainder plus the MCLT. o What to tell the failover partner server: Take the renewal interval (typically half of the actual client lease interval), add to it the desired lease interval, and add it to the current time to yield the value that goes into the potential-expiration-time option. Also tell the failover partner the actual lease interval by adding it to the current time to yield the value that goes into the lease-expiration option. In operation this might work as follows: When a server makes an offer for a new lease on an IP address to a DHCP client, it determines the desired lease interval (in this case, 3 days). It then examines the acknowledged potential lease interval (which in this case is zero) and determines the remainder of the time left to run, which is also zero. To this it adds the MCLT. Since the actual lease interval cannot be allowed to exceed the remainder of the current acknowledged potential lease interval plus the MCLT, the offer made to the client is for the remainder of the current acknowledged potential lease interval (i.e., zero) plus the MCLT. Thus, the actual lease interval is 1 hour. Once the server has performed the BNDACK to the DHCP client, it will update the secondary server with the lease information. How- ever, the desired potential lease interval will be composed of the one half of the current actual lease interval added to the desired lease interval. Thus, the secondary server is updated with a BNDUPD with a lease interval of 3 days + 1/2 hour specified in the potential-expiration-time option. When the primary server receives an ACK to its update of the secondary server's (partner's) potential lease interval, it records that as the acknowledged potential lease interval. A server MUST NOT send a BNDACK in response to a BNDUPD message Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 24] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 until it is sure that the information in the BNDUPD message resides in its stable storage. Thus, the primary server in this case can be sure that the secondary server has recorded the poten- tial lease interval in its stable storage when the primary server receives a BNDACK message from the secondary server. When the DHCP client attempts to renew at T1 (approximately one half an hour from the start of the lease), the primary server again determines the desired lease interval, which is still 3 days. It then compares this with the remaining acknowledged potential lease interval (3 days + 1/2 hour) and adjusts for the time passed since the secondary was last updated (1/2 hour). Thus the time remaining of the acknowledged potential lease interval is 3 days. Adding the MCLT to this yields 3 days plus 1 hour, which is more than the desired lease interval of 3 days. So the client is renewed for the desired lease interval -- 3 days. When the primary DHCP server updates the secondary DHCP server after the DHCP client's renewal ACK is complete, it will calculate the desired potential lease interval as the T1 fraction of the actual client lease interval (1/2 of 3 days this time = 1.5 days). To this it will add the desired client lease interval of 3 days, yielding a total desired partner server lease interval of 4.5 days. In this way, the primary attempts to have the secondary always "lead" the client in its understanding of the client's lease interval so as to be able to always offer the client the desired client lease interval. Once the initial actual client lease interval of the MCLT is past, the protocol operates effectively like the DHCP protocol does today in its behavior concerning lease intervals. However, the guarantee that the actual client lease interval will never exceed the remaining acknowledged partner server lease interval by more than the MCLT allows full recovery from a variety of failures. 5.2.2. Controlled re-allocation of IP addresses When in PARTNER-DOWN state there is a waiting period after which an IP address can be re-allocated to another client. For leases which are available when the server enters PARTNER-DOWN state, the period is the MCLT from entry into PARTNER-DOWN state. For IP addresses which are not available when the server enters PARTNER-DOWN state, the period is the MCLT after the lease becomes available. See sec- tion 9.4.2 for more details. In any other state, a server cannot reallocate an address from one client to another without first notifying its partner (through a BNDUPD message) and receiving acknowledgement (through a BNDACK Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 25] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 message) that its partner is aware that that first client is not using the address. This could be modeled in the following way. Though this specific implementation is in no way required, it may serve to better illus- trate the concept. An "available" IP address on a server may be allocated to any client. An IP address which was leased to a client and which expired or was released by that client would take on a new state, EXPIRED or RELEASED respectively. The partner server would then be notified that this IP address was EXPIRED or RELEASED through a BNDUPD. When the sending server received the BNDACK for that IP address showing it was FREE, it would move the IP address from EXPIRED or RELEASED to FREE, and it would be available for allocation by the primary server to any clients. A server MAY reallocate an IP address in the EXPIRED or RELEASED state to the same client with no restrictions provided it has not sent a BNDUPD message to its partner. This situation would exist if the lease expired or was released after the transition into PARTNER- DOWN state, for instance. 5.3. Load balancing In order to implement load balancing between a primary and secondary server pair, each server must respond to DHCPDISCOVER requests from some clients and not from other clients. In order to do this suc- cessfully, each server must be able to determine immediately upon receipt of a DHCP client request whether it is to service this request or to ignore it in order to allow the other server to service the request. In addition, it should be possible to configure the percentage of clients which will be serviced by either the primary or secondary server. This configuration should be more or less continuous, from all clients serviced by the primary through an even split with half serviced by each, to all clients serviced by the secondary. The technique chosen to support these goals is described in [LOADB]. A bitmap-style Hash Bucket Assignment (as described in [LOADB]) is used to determine which DHCP clients can be processed. There are two potential HBA's in a failover server -- a server HBA and a failover HBA. The way that a server acquires a server HBA is outside of the scope of the failover protocol, but both servers in a failover pair MUST have the same server HBA. The failover HBA is sent by the Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 26] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 primary server to the secondary server whenever a connection is esta- blished, using the hash-bucket-assignment option defined in section 12.11. When using the server HBA (if any) and the failover HBA (if any), to decide whether to process a DHCP request, the server HBA always applies in every failover state, and the failover HBA (which MUST be a subset of the server HBA) is used by the secondary server to decide which packets to process when in NORMAL state. 5.4. Operating in NORMAL state When in NORMAL state, each server services DHCPDISCOVER's and all other DHCP requests other than DHCPREQUEST/RENEWAL or DHCPREQUEST/REBINDING from the client set defined by the load balanc- ing algorithm [LOADB]. Each server services DHCPREQUEST/RENEWAL or DHCPDISCOVER/REBINDING requests from any client. In general, whenever the binding database is changed in stable storage (other than a change resulting from receiving a BNDUPD from the failover partner), then a BNDUPD message is sent with the con- tents of that change to the partner server. The partner server then writes the information about that binding in its bindings database in stable storage and replies with a BNDACK message. The binding database in a DHCP server would normally be changed as a result of DHCP protocol activity with a DHCP client (e.g., granting a lease to a DHCP client through the familiar DISCOVER/OFFER/REQUEST/ACK cycle or extending a lease due to a renewal from a DHCP client) or possibly (on some servers) because a lease has expired or undergone another state change that must be recorded in the DHCP binding database. These are the state changes that would be communicated to the partner server using a BNDUPD mes- sage. Of course, receipt of a BNDUPD message itself will normally cause an update of the binding database for all of the IP addresses contained in the BNDUPD, and a binding database change such as this MUST NOT trigger a corresponding BNDUPD message to the partner. 5.5. Operating in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state When operating in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state, each server is operating independently, but does not assume that its partner is not operating. The partner server might be operating and simply unable to communicate with this server, or might not be operating. Each server responds to the full range of DHCP client messages that it receives, but in such a way that graceful reintegration is always possible when its partner comes back into contact with it. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 27] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 5.6. Operating in PARTNER-DOWN state When operating in PARTNER-DOWN state, a server assumes that its partner is not currently operating, but does make allowances for the possibility that that server was operating in the past, though possi- bly out of communications with this server. It responds to all DHCP client requests in PARTNER-DOWN state. 5.7. Operating in RECOVER state A server operating in RECOVER state assumes that it is reintegrating with a server that has been operating in PARTNER-DOWN state, and that it needs to update its bindings database before it services DHCP client requests. A server may also operate in RECOVER state in order to fully recover its bindings database from its partner server. 5.8. Operating in STARTUP state A server operating in STARTUP state assumes that failover is opera- tional, and it spends a short time whenever it comes up attempting to contact the partner. During this time (generally a few seconds), the server is unresponsive to DHCP client requests. This period exists in order to give a server a chance to determine that its partner has changed state since it was last in communications, and to react to that changed state (if any) prior to responding to DHCP client requests. The period of time a server remains in STARTUP state SHOULD be long enough to ensure that it will connect to the other server if that server is available for connections. 5.9. Time synchronization between servers The failover protocol is designed to operate between two servers which have time values which differ by an arbitrarily large amount. A particular implementation MAY choose to only support servers whose time values differ by an arbitrarily small amount. In any event, whether large or only small differences in time values are supported, every message that is received MUST be tagged with a time value as soon as possible after receipt. This time value is used along with the time value that is sent in every message between the failover partners to develop a delta time between the servers. This delta time is used during the connection process to establish a baseline delta time between the servers, and upon receipt of each message, the delta time for that message is used to refine the delta Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 28] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 time for the server pair. While the algorithm for this refinement of delta time is not speci- fied as part of this protocol, a server SHOULD allow the delta time value for a pair of failover servers to be periodically updated to account for time drift. In addition, the delta time value between servers SHOULD be smoothed in some fashion, so that transient network delays will not cause it to vary wildly. A server SHOULD recognize a drastic change in the delta time value as an event to be signaled to a network administrator, as well as reset- ting the time delta between the failover partners. The specific definitions of a minor or drastic change in delta time as well as the algorithm used to smooth minor changes into the run- ning delta time are implementation issues and are not further addresses in this document. 5.10. IP address binding-status In most DHCP servers an IP address can take on several different binding-status values, sometimes also called states. While no two DHCP servers probably have exactly the same possible binding-status values, the DHCP RFC enforces some commonality among the general semantics of the binding-status values used by various DHCP server implementations. In order to transmit binding database updates between one server and another using the failover protocol, some common denominator binding-status values must be defined. It is not expected that these binding-status-values correspond with any actual implementation of the DHCP protocol in a DHCP server, but rather that the binding- status values defined in this document should be a common denominator of those in use by many DHCP server implementations. It is a goal of this protocol that any DHCP server can map the various IP address binding-status values that it uses internally into these failover IP address binding-status values on transmission of binding database updates to its partner, and likewise that it can map any failover IP address binding-status values it received in a binding update into its internal IP address binding-status values. The IP address binding-status values defined for the failover proto- col are listed below. Unless otherwise noted below, there MAY be client information associated with each of these binding-status values. o Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 29] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 o ACTIVE -- Lease is assigned to a client. Client identification MUST appear. o EXPIRED -- indicates that a client's binding on an IP address has expired. When the partner server ACK's the BNDUPD of an EXPIRED IP address, the server sets its internal state to FREE. It is then available for allocation to any client of the primary server. It may be allocated to the same client on the server where the lease expired if a BNDUPD containing the EXPIRED state has not yet been sent to the partner (e.g., in the event that the servers are not in communication). Client identification SHOULD appear. o RELEASED -- indicates that a DHCP client sent in a DHCPRELEASE message. When the partner server ACK's the BNDUPD of an RELEASED IP address, the server sets its internal state to FREE, and it is available for allocation by the primary server to any DHCP client. It may be allocated to the same client if a BNDUPD has not yet been sent to the partner. Client identification SHOULD appear. o FREE -- is used when a DHCP server needs to communicate that an IP address is unused by any DHCP client, but it was not just released, expired, or reset by a network administrator. When the partner server ACK's the BNDUPD of a FREE IP address, the server sets its internal state such that it is available for allocation by the primary DHCP server to any DHCP client. (Note that in PARTNER-DOWN state, after waiting the MCLT, the IP address MAY be allocated to a DHCP client by the secondary server.) Note that when an IP address that was allocated by the secondary reverts to the FREE state, it must (like any other IP address) be assigned to the secondary through the POOLREQ/BNDUPD process before the secondary can reallocate it. Client identification MAY appear. o ABANDONED -- indicates that an IP address is considered unusable by the DHCP subsystem. An IP address for which a valid PING response was received SHOULD be set to ABANDONED. An IP address for which a DHCPDECLINE was received should be set to ABANDONED. Client identification MUST NOT appear. o RESET -- indicates that this IP address was made available by operator command. This is a distinct state so that the reason that the IP address became FREE can be determined. Client iden- tification MAY appear. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 30] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 o BACKUP -- indicates that this IP address can be allocated by the secondary server to a DHCP client at any time. When the MCLT has passed after its time of entry into PARTNER-DOWN state, the IP address may be allocated by the primary to any DHCP client. Client identification MAY appear. These binding-status values are communicated from one failover partner to another using the binding-status option, see section 12.3 for details of this option. Unless otherwise noted above there MAY be client information associated with each of these binding-status values. An IP address will move between these binding-status values using the following state transition diagram: Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 31] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 DHCP client DECLINE or server detected problem from any state +----------+ V +---------+ External >---->| RESET | | |ABANDONED| command | | +-->| | +----------+ +---------+ | Comm w/Parter(1) V +---------+ Comm(1) +----------+ Comm(1) +---------+ | EXPIRED |--------->| FREE |<----------| RELEASED| | | w/Parter | | w/Partner | | +---------+ +----------+ +---------+ ^ ^ | | +-----------+ ^ | | | | | | | Exp. grace IP | IP addr alloc. IP addr | | period ends address to sec.(2) reserved | | | leasedy V V | | | by | +----------+ +---------+ | | | primary| BACKUP | | BACKUP- | | | wait for | | | | RESERVED| | | grace period | +----------+ +---------+ | | | | | | | | | IP addr leased by | | Expired grace | secondary | | period exists V V | | | +----------+ | | | Lease on | ACTIVE | DHCPRELEASE | +-----+-IP addr---| |------------------+ expires +----------+ Figure 5.10-1: Transitions between binding-status values. (1) This transition MAY also occur if the server is in PARTNER-DOWN state and the MCLT has passed since the entry in the RELEASED, EXPIRED, or RESET states. (2) This transition MAY occur if the server is the secondary and the MCLT has passed since its entry into PARTNER-DOWN state. Again, note that a DHCP server implementing the failover protocol does not have to implement either this state machine or use these Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 32] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 particular binding-status values in its normal operation of allocat- ing IP addresses to DHCP clients. It only needs to map its internal binding-status-values onto these "standard" binding-status values, and map these "standard" binding-status values back into its internal binding-status values. For example, a server which implements a grace period for a IP address binding SHOULD simply wait to update its partner server until the grace period on that binding has run out. The process of setting an IP address to FREE deserves some detailed discussion. When an IP address is moved to the EXPIRED,RELEASED, or RESET binding-status on a server, it will send a BNDUPD with the binding-status of EXPIRED, RELEASED, or RESET to its partner. If its partner agrees that is acceptable (see sections 7.1.2 and 7.1.3 con- cerning why a server might not accept a BNDUPD) it will return a BNDACK with no reject-reason, signifying that it accepted the update. As part of the BNDUPD processing, the server returning the BNDACK will set the binding-status of the IP address to FREE, and upon receipt of the BNDACK the server which sent the BNDUPD will set the binding-status of the IP address to FREE. Thus, the EXPIRED, RELEASED, or RESET binding-status is something of a transitory state. This process is encoded in the transition diagram above by "Comm w/Partner". 5.11. DNS dynamic update considerations DHCP servers (and clients) can use DNS Dynamic Updates as described in [RFC 2136] to maintain DNS name-mappings as they maintain DHCP leases. Many different administrative models for DHCP-DNS integra- tion are possible. Descriptions of several of these models, and guidelines that DHCP servers and clients should follow in carrying them out, are laid out in [DDNS]. The nature of the DHCP failover protocol introduces some issues concerning dynamic DNS updates that are not part of non-failover DHCP environments. This section describes these issues, and defines the information which failover partners should exchange and the protocol which they should follow in order to ensure consistent behavior. The presence of this section should not be interpreted as requiring that implementations of the DHCP failover protocol must also support DDNS updates. The purpose of this discussion is to clarify the areas where the DHCP failover and DHCP-DDNS protocols intersect for the benefit of implementations which support both protocols, not to introduce a new requirement into the DHCP failover protocol. Thus, a DHCP server which implements the failover protocol MAY also support dynamic DNS updates, but if it does support dynamic DNS updates it SHOULD utilize the techniques described here in order to correctly distribute them between the failover partners. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 33] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 From the standpoint of the failover protocol, there is no reason why a server which is utilizing the DDNS protocol to update a DNS server should not be a partner with a server which is not utilizing the DDNS protocol to update a DNS server. However, a server which is not able to support DDNS or is not configured to support DDNS SHOULD output a warning message when it receives BNDUPD messages which indicate that its failover partner is configured to support the DDNS protocol to update a DNS server. An implementation MAY consider this an error and refuse to operate, or it MAY choose to operate anyway, having warned the user of the problem in some way. 5.11.1. Relationship between failover and dynamic DNS update The failover protocol describes the conditions under which each fail- over server may renew a lease to its current DHCP client, and describes the conditions under which it may grant a lease to a new DHCP client. An analogous set of conditions determines when a fail- over server should initiate a DDNS update, and when it should attempt to remove records from the DNS. The failover protocol's conditions are based on the desired external behavior: avoiding duplicate address assignments; allowing clients to continue using leases which they obtained from one failover partner even if they can only commun- icate with the other partner; allowing the backup DHCP server to grant new leases even if it is unable to communicate with the primary server. The desired external DDNS behavior for DHCP failover servers is: 1. Allow timely DDNS updates from the server which grants a client a lease. Recognize that there is often a DDNS update lifecycle which parallels the DHCP lease lifecycle. This is likely to include the addition of records when the lease is granted, and the removal of DNS records when the lease is sub- sequently made available for allocation to a different client. 2. Communicate enough information between the two failover servers to allow one to complete the DDNS update 'lifecycle' even if the other server originally granted the lease. 3. Avoid redundant or overlapping DDNS updates, where both fail- over servers are attempting to perform DDNS updates for the same lease-client binding. Avoid situations where one partner is attempting to add RRs related to a lease binding while the other partner is attempting to remove RRs related to the same lease binding. 5.11.2. Use of the DDNS option In order for either server to be able to complete a DDNS update, or Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 34] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 to remove DNS records which were added by its partner, both servers need to know the FQDN associated with the lease-client binding. The FQDN associated with the client's A RR and PTR RR SHOULD be communi- cated from the server which adds records into the DNS to its partner. The initiating server SHOULD use the DDNS option in the BNDUPD mes- sages to inform the partner server of the status of any DDNS updates associated with a lease binding. Failover servers MAY choose not to include the DDNS option in BNDUPD messages if there has been no change in the status of any DDNS update related to the lease binding. The partner server receiving BNDUPD messages containing the DDNS option SHOULD compare the status flags and the FQDN contained in the option data with the current DDNS information it has associated with the lease binding, and update its notion of the DDNS status accord- ingly. The initiating server MAY send a BNDUPD to its partner before the DDNS update has been successfully completed. If it does so, it SHOULD leave the 'C' bit in the Flags field clear, to indicate to the partner that the DDNS update may not be complete. When the DDNS update has been successfully acknowledged by the DNS server, the ini- tiating DHCP server SHOULD include the DDNS option in its next BNDUPD message about the binding, so that the partner server will be able to record the final status of the DDNS update. The initiating server SHOULD set the 'C' bit in the DDNS option if the DDNS update was suc- cessfully accepted by the DNS server. Some implementations will choose to send a BNDUPD without waiting for the DDNS update to complete, and then will send a second BNDUPD once the DDNS update is complete. Other implementations will delay sending the partner a BNDUPD until the DDNS update has been acknowledged by the DNS server, or until some time-limit has elapsed, in order to avoid sending a second BNDUPD. The Domain Name field in the DDNS option contains the FQDN that will be associated with the A RR (if the server is performing an A RR update for the client) and the PTR RR. This FQDN may be composed in any of several ways, depending on server configuration and the infor- mation provided by the client in its DHCP messages. The client may supply a hostname which it would like the server to use in forming the FQDN, or it may supply the entire FQDN. The server may be config- ured to attempt to use the information the client supplies, it may be configured with an FQDN to use for the client, or it may be config- ured to synthesize an FQDN. The responsive server SHOULD include the FQDN that it will be using in DDNS updates it initiates when it sends the DDNS option. Since the responsive server may not have completed the DDNS update at the time it sends the first BNDUPD about the lease binding, there may Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 35] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 be cases where the FQDN in later BNDUPD messages does not match the FQDN included in earlier messages. For example, the responsive server may be configured to handle situations where two or more DHCP client FQDNs are identical by modifying the most-specific label in the FQDNs of some of the clients in an attempt to generate unique FQDNs for them (a process sometimes called "disambiguation"). Alter- natively, at sites which use some or all of the information which clients supply to form the FQDN, it's possible that a client's confi- guration may be changed so that it begins to supply new data. The responsive server may react by removing the DNS records which it ori- ginally added for the client, and replacing them with records that refer to the client's new FQDN. In such cases, the responsive server SHOULD include the actual FQDN that was used in subsequent DDNS options. The responsive server SHOULD include relevant client-option data in the client-request-options option in its BNDUPD messages. This information may be necessary in order to allow the non- responsive partner to detect client configuration changes that change the hostname or FQDN data which the client includes in its DHCP requests. 5.11.3. Adding RRs to the DNS A failover server which is going to perform DDNS updates SHOULD ini- tiate the DDNS update when it grants a new lease to a client. The non-responsive partner SHOULD NOT initiate a DDNS update when it receives the BNDUPD after the lease has been granted. The failover protocol ensures that only one of the partners will grant a lease to any individual client, so it follows that this requirement will prevent both partners from initiating updates simultaneously. The server initiating the update SHOULD follow the protocol in [DDNS]. The server may be configured to perform an A RR update on behalf of its clients, or not. Ordinarily, a failover server will not initiate DDNS updates when it renews leases. In two cases, however, a failover server MAY initiate a DDNS update when it renews a lease to its existing client: 1. When the lease was granted before the server was configured to perform DDNS updates, the server MAY be configured to perform updates when it next renews existing leases. Since both servers are responsive to renewals in NORMAL state, it is not enough to simply require the non-responsive server to avoid a DNS update in this case. The server which would be responsive to a DHCPDISCOVER from this client (even though the current request is a DHCPREQUEST/RENEW) is the server which should initiate the DDNS update. 2. If a server is in PARTNER-DOWN state, it can conclude that its partner is no longer attempting to perform an update for the Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 36] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 existing client. If the remaining server has not recorded that an update for the binding has been successfully completed, the server MAY initiate a DDNS update. It MAY initiate this update immediately upon entry to PARTNER-DOWN state, it may perform this in the background, or it MAY initiate this update upon next hearing from the DHCP client. 5.11.4. Deleting RRs from the DNS The failover server which makes an IP address FREE SHOULD initiate any DDNS deletes, if it has recorded that DNS records were added on behalf of the client. A server not in PARTNER-DOWN state "makes an IP address FREE" when it initiates a BNDUPD with a binding-status of FREE, EXPIRED, or RELEASED. Its partner confirms this status by acking that BNDUPD, and upon receipt of the ACK the server has "made the IP address FREE". Conversely, a server in PARTNER-DOWN state "makes an IP address FREE" when it sets the binding-status to FREE, since in PARTNER-DOWN state not communications is required with the partner. It is at this point that it should initiate the DDNS operations to delete RRs from the DDNS. Its partner SHOULD NOT initiate DDNS deletes for DNS records related to the lease binding as part of send- ing the BNDACK message. The partner MAY have issued BNDUPD messages with a binding-status of FREE, EXPIRED, or RELEASED previously, but the other server will have NAKed these BNDUPD messages. The failover protocol ensures that only one of the two partner servers will be able to make a lease FREE. The server making the lease FREE may be doing so while it is in NORMAL communication with its partner, or it may be in PARTNER-DOWN state. If a server is in PARTNER-DOWN state, it may be performing DDNS deletes for RRs which its partner added originally. This allows a single remaining partner server to assume responsibility for all of the DDNS activity which the two servers were undertaking. Another implication of this approach is that no DDNS RR deletes will be performed while either server is in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state, since no IP addresses are moved into the FREE state during that period. 5.12. Reservations and failover Some DHCP servers support a capability to offer specific pre- configured IP addresses to DHCP clients. These are real DHCP clients, they do the entire DHCP protocol, but these servers always offer the client a specific pre-configured IP address -- and they Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 37] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 offer that IP address to no other clients. Such a capability has several names, but it is sometimes called a "reservation", in that the IP address is reserved for a particular DHCP client. In a situation where there are two DHCP servers serving the same sub- net without using failover, the two DHCP server's need to have dis- joint IP address pools, but identical reservations for the DHCP clients. In a failover context, both servers need to be configured with the proper reservations in an identical manner, but if we stop there problems can occur around the edge conditions where reservations are made for an IP address that has already been leased to a different client. Different servers handle this conflict in different ways, but the goal of the failover protocol is to allow correct operation with any server's approach to the normal processing of the DHCP pro- tocol. The general solution with regards to reservations is as follows. Whenever a reserved IP address becomes FREE (i.e., when first config- ured or whenever a client frees it or it expires or is reset), the primary server MUST show that IP address as FREE (and thus available for its own allocation) and it MUST send it to the secondary server as BACKUP-RESERVED, in order that the secondary server be able to allocate it as well. Note that this implies that a reserved IP address goes through the normal state changes from FREE to ACTIVE (and possibly back to FREE). The failover protcol supports this approach to reservations, i.e., where the IP address undergoes the normal state changes of any IP address, but it can only be offered to the client for which it is reserved. Other approaches to the support of reservations exist in some DHCP server implementations (e.g., where the IP address is apparently leased to a particular client forever, without any expira- tion). The goal is for the failover protocol to support any of the usual approaches to reservations, both those that allow an IP address to go through different states when reserved, and those that don't. From the above, it follows that a reservation soley on the secondary will not necessarily allow the secondary to offer that address to client to whom it is reserved. The reservation must also appear on the primary as well for the secondary to be able to offer the IP address to the client to which is is reserved. When the reservation on an IP address is cancelled, if the IP address is currently FREE and the server is the primary, or BACKUP and the server is the secondary, the server MUST send a BNDUPD to the other server with the binding-status FREE. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 38] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 5.13. Dynamic BOOTP and failover Some DHCP servers support a capability to offer IP addresses to BOOTP clients without having a particular address previously allocated for those clients. This capability is often called something like "dynamic BOOTP". It is discussed briefly in RFC 1534 [RFC 1534]. This capability has a negative interaction with the fundamental ele- ments of the failover protocol, in that an address handed out to a BOOTP device has no term (or effectively no term, in that usually they are considered leases for "forever"). There is no opportunity to hand out a lease which is only the MCLT long when first hearing from a BOOTP device, because they may only interact once with the DHCP server and they have no notion of a lease expiration time. Thus the entire concept of the MCLT and waiting the MCLT after entering PARTNER-DOWN state is defeated when dealing with BOOTP devices. With some restrictions, however, dynamic BOOTP devices can be sup- ported in a server on a subnet where failover is supported. The only restriction (and it is not small) is that on any portion of the sub- net (in any address pool) where dynamic BOOTP devices can be allo- cated IP addresses, a DHCP server MUST NOT ever use any of the IP addresses which were previously available for allocation by its fail- over partner. Thus, the addresses allocated by the primary to the secondary for allocation that might have been allocated to BOOTP dev- ices MUST NOT ever be used by the primary server even if it is in PARTNER-DOWN state and has waited the MCLT after entering that state. Conversely, addresses available for allocation by the primary MUST NOT be used by the secondary even it is in PARTNER-DOWN state. The reason for this is because one of those IP address could have been allocated by the secondary server to a BOOTP device, and the primary server would have no way of ever knowing that happened. 5.14. Guidelines for selecting MCLT There is no one correct value for the MCLT. There is an explicit tradeoff between various factors in selecting an MCLT value. 5.14.1. Short MCLT A short MCLT value will mean that after entering PARTNER-DOWN state, a server will only have to wait a short time before it can start allocating its partner's IP addresses to DHCP clients. Furthermore, it will only have to wait a short time after the expiration of a lease on an IP address before it can reallocate that IP address to another DHCP client. However the downside of a short MCLT value is that the initial lease Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 39] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 interval that will be offered to every new DHCP client will be short, which will cause increased traffic as those clients will need to send in their first renew in a half of a short MCLT time. In addition, the lease extensions that a server in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state can give will be only the MCLT after the server has been in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED for around the desired client lease period. If a server stays in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED for that long, then the leases it hands out will be short and that will increase the load on that server, possibly causing difficulty. 5.14.2. Long MCLT A long MCLT value will mean that the initial lease period will be longer and the time that a server in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state will be able to extend leases (after it has been in COMMUNICATIONS- INTERRUPTED state for around the desired client lease period) will be longer. However, a server entering PARTNER-DOWN state will have to wait the longer MCLT before being able to allocate its partner's IP addresses to new DHCP clients. This may mean that additional IP addresses are required in order to cover this time period. Further, the server in PARTNER-DOWN will have to wait the longer MCLT from every lease expiration before it can reallocate an IP address to a different DHCP client. 6. Common Message Format This section discusses the common message format that all failover messages have in common, including the message header format as well as the common option format. See section 12 for the the definitions of the specific options used in the failover protocol. 6.1. Message header format The options contained in the payload data section of the failover message all use a two byte option number and two byte length format. All failover protocol messages are sent over the TCP connection between failover endpoints and encoded using a message format specific to the failover protocol. There exists a common message format for all failover messages, which utilizes the options in a way similar to the DHCP protocol. For each message type, some options are required and some are optional. In addition, when a message is received any options that are not under- stood by the receiving server MUST be ignored. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 40] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 All of the fields in the fixed portion of the message MUST be filled with correct data in every message sent. 0 1 2 3 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ | message length (2) | msg type (1) |payload off (1)| +---------------+---------------+---------------+---------------+ | time (4) | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | xid (4) | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | 0 or more additional header bytes (variable) | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | payload data (variable) | | | | formatted as DHCP-style options | | using a two byte option code and two byte length | | See section 6.2 for details. | +---------------------------------------------------------------+ message length - 2 bytes, network byte order This is the length of the message. It includes the two byte message length itself. The maximum length is 2048 bytes. The minimum length is 12. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 41] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 msg type - 1 byte The message type field is used to distinguish between messages. The following message types are defined: Value Message Type ----- ------------ 0 reserved not used 1 POOLREQ request allocation of addresses 2 POOLRESP respond with allocation count 3 BNDUPD update partner with binding info 4 BNDACK acknowledge receipt of binding update 5 CONNECT establish connection with the secondary 6 CONNECTACK respond to attempt to establish connection with partner 7 UPDREQALL request full transfer of binding info 8 UPDDONE ack send and ack of req'd binding info 9 UPDREQ req transfer of un-acked binding info 10 STATE inform partner of current state or state change 11 CONTACT probe communications integrity with partner 12 DISCONNECT close a connection New message types should be defined in one of two ranges, 0-127 or 129-255. The range of 0-127 is used for messages that MUST be sup- ported by every server, and if a server receives a message in the range of 0-127 that it doesn't understand, it MUST close the TCP con- nection. The range of 128-255 is used for messages which MAY be sup- ported but are not required, and if a server receives a message in this range that it does not understand it SHOULD ignore the message. payload offset - 1 byte The byte offset of the Payload Data, from the beginning of the failover message header. The value for the current protocol version (version 1) is 8. time - 4 bytes, network byte order The absolute time in GMT when the message was transmitted, represented as seconds elapsed since Jan 1, 1970 (i.e., similar to the ANSI C time_t time value representation). While the ANSI C time_t value is signed, the value used in this specification is unsigned. A server SHOULD set this time as close to the actual transmission of the message as possible. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 42] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 xid - 4 bytes, network byte order This is the transaction id of the failover message. The sender of a failover protocol message is responsible for setting this number, and the receiver of the message copies the number over into any response message, treating it as opaque data. The sender MUST ensure that every message sent from a particular failover endpoint over the associated TCP connection has a unique transaction id. For failover messages that have no corresponding response message, the XID value is meaningless, but MUST be supplied. The XID value is used solely by the receiver of a response message to determine the corresponding request message. Requests messages where the XID is used in the corresponding response messages are: POOLREQ, BNDUPD, CONNECT, UPDREQALL, and UPDREQ. The corresponding response messages are POOLRESP, BNDACK, CONNECTACK, UPDDONE, and UPDDONE, respectively. As requests/responses don't survive connection reestablishment, XIDs only need to be unique during a specific connection. payload data - variable length The options are placed after the header, after skipping payload offset bytes from beginning of the message. The payload data options are not preceded by a "cookie" value. The payload data is formatted as DHCP style options using two byte option codes and two byte option lengths. The option codes are in a namespace which is unique to the failover protocol. The maximum length of the payload data in octets is 2048 less the size of the header, i.e., the maximum message length is 2048 octets. 6.2. Common option format The options contained in the payload data section of the failover message all use a two byte option number and two byte length format. The option numbers are drawn from an option number space unique to the failover protocol. All of the message types share a common option number space and common options definitions, though not all options are required or meaningful for every message. In contrast to the options which appear in DHCP client and server messages, the options in failover message are ordered. That is, for Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 43] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 some messages the order in which the options appear in the payload data area is significant. The messages for which option ordering is significant explicitly describe the ordering requirements. If no ordering requirements are mentioned, then the order is not signifi- cant for that message. For all options which refer to time, they all use an absolute time in GMT. Time synchronization has already been achieved between the source and the target server using the CONNECT message and is updated and refined using the time in every packet. The time value is an unsigned 32 bit integer in network byte order giving the number of seconds since 00:00 UTC, 1st January 1970. This can be converted to an NTP timestamp by adding decimal 2208988800. This time format will not wrap until the year 2106. Until sometime in 2038, it is equal to the ANSI C time_t value (which is a signed 32 bit value and will overflow into a negative number in 2038). Options should appear once only in each message (except for BNDUPD and BNDACK messages where bulking is used, see section 6.3 for details.) An option that appears twice is not concatenated, but treated as an error. Specific option values are described in section 12. See section 13 for how to define additional options. 6.3. Batching multiple binding update transactions in one BNDUPD mes- sage Implementations of this protocol MAY send multiple binding update transactions in one BNDUPD message, where a binding update transac- tion is defined as the set of options which are associated with the update of a single IP address. All implementations of this protocol MUST be prepared to receive BNDUPD messages which contain multiple binding update transactions and respond correctly to them, including replying with a BNDACK message which contains status for the multiple binding update transactions contained in the BNDUPD message. In the discussion of sending and receiving BNDUPD messages in section 7.1 and BNDACK messages in section 7.2, each BNDUPD message and BNDACK message is assumed to contain a single binding update transac- tion in order to reduce the complexity of the discussions in section 7. Multiple binding update transactions MAY be batched together in one BNDUPD protocol message with the data sets for the individual tran- sactions delimited by the assigned-IP-address option, which MUST Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 44] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 appear first in the option set for each transaction. Ordering of options between the assigned-IP-address options is not significant. This is illustrated in the following schematic representation: Non-IP Address/Non-client specific options first assigned-IP-address option for the first IP address Options pertaining to first address, including at least the binding-status option and others as required. assigned-IP-address option for the second IP address Options pertaining to second address, including at least the binding-status option and others as required. ... Trailing options (message digest). There MUST be a one-to-one correspondence between BNDUPD and BNDACK messages, and every BNDACK message MUST contain status for all of the binding update transactions in the corresponding BNDUPD message. The BNDACK message corresponding to a BNDUPD message MUST contain assigned-IP-address options for all of the binding update transac- tions in the BNDUPD message. Thus, every BNDACK message contains exactly the same assigned-IP-address options as does its correspond- ing BNDUPD message. The order of the assigned-IP-address options MAY, however, be different. Here is a schematic representation of a BNDACK: Non-IP Address/Non-client specific options first assigned-IP-address option for the first IP address If rejected, reject-reason option and message option. assigned-IP-address option for the second IP address If rejected, reject-reason option and message option. ... Trailing options (message digest). In case the server chooses to reject some or all of the IP address binding information in a BNDUPD message in a BNDACK reply, the BNDACK message MUST contain a reject-reason option following every assigned-IP-address option in order to indicate that the binding update transaction for that IP address was not accepted and why. As with a BNDACK message containing a single binding update transaction, an assigned-IP-address option without any associated reject-reason option indicates a successful binding update transaction. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 45] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 7. Protocol Messages This section contains the detailed definition of the protocol mes- sages, including the information to include when sending the message, as well as the actions to take upon receiving the message. The mes- sage type for each message appears as [n] in the heading for the mes- sage (see section 6.1). 7.1. BNDUPD message [3] The binding update (BNDUPD) message is used to send the binding data- base changes (known as binding update transactions) to the partner server, and the partner server responds with a binding acknowledge- ment (BNDACK) message when it has successfully committed those changes to its own stable storage. The rest of the failover protocol exists to determine whether the partner server is able to communicate or not, and to enable the partners to exchange BNDUPD/BNDACK messages in order to keep their binding databases in stable storage synchronized. The rest of this section is written as though every BNDUPD message contains only a single binding update transaction in order to reduce the complexity of the discussion. See section 6.3 for information on how to create and process BNDUPD and BNDACK messages which contain multiple binding update transactions. Note that while a server MAY generate BNDUPD messages with multiple binding update transactions, every server MUST be able to process a BNDUPD message which contains multiple binding update transactions and generate the corresponding BNDACK messages with status for multiple binding update transactions. The following table summarizes the various options for the BNDUPD message. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 46] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 binding-status BACKUP RESET ABANDONED Option ACTIVE EXPIRED RELEASED FREE ------ ------ ------- -------- ---- assigned-IP-address (3) MUST MUST MUST MUST binding-status MUST MUST MUST MUST client-identifier MAY MAY MAY MAY(2) client-hardware-address MUST MUST MUST MAY(2) lease-expiration-time MUST MUST NOT MUST NOT MUST NOT potential-expiration-time MUST MUST NOT MUST NOT MUST NOT start-time-of-state SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD client-last-trans.-time MUST SHOULD MUST MAY DDNS(1) SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD client-request-options SHOULD SHOULD NOT SHOULD SHOULD NOT client-reply-options SHOULD SHOULD NOT SHOULD NOT SHOULD NOT (1) MUST if server is performing dynamic DNS for this IP address, else MUST NOT. (2) MUST NOT if binding-status is ABANDONED. (3) assigned-IP-address MUST be the first option for an IP address Table 7.1-1: Options used in a BNDUPD message 7.1.1. Sending the BNDUPD message A BNDUPD message SHOULD be generated whenever any binding changes. A change might be in the binding-status, the lease-expiration-time, or even just the last-transaction-time. In general, any time a DHCP server writes its stable storage, a BNDUPD message SHOULD be gen- erated. This will often be the result of the processing of a DHCP client request, but it might also be the result of a successful dynamic DNS update operation. BNDUPD (and BNDACK) messages refer to the binding-status of the IP address, and this protocol defines a series of binding-statuses, dis- cussed in more detail below. Some servers may not support all of these binding-statuses, and so in those cases they will not be sent. Upon receipt of a BNDUPD message which contains an unsupported binding-status, a reasonable interpretation should be made (see sec- tion 5.10). All BNDUPD messages MUST contain the IP address of the binding update transaction in the assigned-IP-address option. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 47] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 All binding update transactions contain a binding-status option, and it will have one of the values found in section 5.10. Client infor- mation consists of client-hardware-address and possibly a client- identifier, and is explained in more detail later in this section. The following table indicates whether client information should or should not appear with each binding-status in a binding update tran- saction: binding-status includes client information ------------------------------------------------ ACTIVE MUST EXPIRED SHOULD RELEASED SHOULD FREE MAY ABANDONED MUST NOT RESET MAY BACKUP MAY Table 7.1.1-1: Client information required by various binding-status values. The ACTIVE binding-status requires some options to indicate the length of the binding: o lease-expiration-time The lease-expiration-time option MUST appear, and be set to the expiration time most recently ACKed to the DHCP client. Note that the time ACKed to a DHCP client is a lease duration in seconds, while the lease-expiration-time option in a BNDUPD mes- sage is an absolute time value. o potential-expiration-time The potential-expiration-time option MUST appear, and be set to a value beyond that of the lease-expiration time. This is the value that is ACKed by the BNDACK message. A server sending a BNDUPD message MUST be able to recover the potential- expiration-time sent in every BNDUPD, not just those that receive a corresponding BNDACK, in order to be able to protect against possible duplicate allocation of IP addresses after transitioning to PARTNER-DOWN state. See section 5.2.1 for details as to why the potential-expiration-time exists and guidelines for how to decide on the value. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 48] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 The following option information applies to all BNDUPD messages, regardless of the value of the binding-status, unless otherwise noted. o Identifying the client For many of the binding-status values a client MUST appear while for others a client MAY appear, and for some a client MUST NOT appear. A client is identified in a BNDUPD message by at least one and pos- sibly two options. The client-hardware-address option MUST appear any time that a client appears in a BNDUPD message, and contains the hardware type and chaddr information from the DHCP request packet. A failover client-identifier option MUST appear any time that a client appears in a BNDUPD message if and only if that client used a DHCP client-identifier option when communicating with the DHCP server. See section 12.5 and 12.4 for details of how to construct these two options from a DHCP request packet. o start-time-of-state The start-time-of-state SHOULD appear. It is set to the time at which this IP address first took on the state that corresponds to the current value of binding-status. o last-transaction-time The last-transaction-time value SHOULD appear. This is the time at which this DHCP server last received a packet from the DHCP client referenced by the client-identifier or client-hardware-address that was associated with the IP address referenced by the assigned-IP- address. o DDNS If the DHCP server is performing dynamic DNS operations on behalf of the DHCP client represented by the client-identifier or client- hardware-address, then it should include a DDNS option containing the domain name and status of any dynamic DNS operations enabled. o client-request-options If the BNDUPD was triggered by a request from a DHCP client (typi- cally those with binding-status of ACTIVE and RELEASED), then the server SHOULD include options of interest to a failover partner from the client's request packet in the client-request-options for transmission to its partner (see section 12.8). Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 49] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 A server sending a BNDUPD SHOULD remember the "interesting" options or the information that would appear in an "interesting" option for transmission at a time when the BNDUPD is not closely associated with a DHCP client request. A server SHOULD send the following "interesting" options. It MAY send any DHCP client options. As new options are defined, the RFC defining these options SHOULD include information that they are "interesting to failover servers" if they should be sent as part of a BNDUPD. option option number name ----------------------------------------- 12 host-name 81 client-FQDN [DDNS] 82 relay-agent-information [AGENTINFO] TBD user-class [USERCLASS] 60 vendor-class-identifier Table 7.1.1-2: Options which SHOULD be sent in the client-request-options option in a BNDUPD message. o client-reply-options If the BNDUPD was triggered by a request from a DHCP client (typi- cally those with binding-status of ACTIVE and RELEASED), then the server SHOULD include options of interest to a failover partner from the server's DHCP reply packet in the client-reply-options for transmission to its partner (see section 12.7). A server sending a BNDUPD SHOULD remember the "interesting" options or the information that would appear in an "interesting" option for transmission at a time when the BNDUPD is not closely associated with a DHCP client request. A server SHOULD send the following "interesting" options. It MAY send any DHCP client options. As new options are defined, the RFC defining these options SHOULD include information that they are "interesting to failover servers" if they should be sent as part of a BNDUPD. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 50] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 option option number name ----------------------------------------- 58 renewal-time 59 rebinding-time Table 7.1.1-3: Options which SHOULD be sent in the client-reply-options option in a BNDUPD message. The BNDUPD message SHOULD be sent as soon as possible from the time that the DHCP client received a response and the lease bindings data- base is written on stable storage. 7.1.2. Receiving the BNDUPD message When a server receives a BNDUPD message, it needs to decide how to process the binding update transaction it contains and whether that transaction represents a conflict of any sort. The conflict resolu- tion process MUST be used on the receipt of every BNDUPD message, not just those that are received while in POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state, in order to increase the robustness of the protocol. There are three sorts of conflicts: o Two clients, one IP address conflict This is the duplicate IP address allocation conflict. There are two different clients each allocated the same address. See sec- tion 7.1.3 for how to resolve this conflict. o Two IP addresses, one client conflict This conflict exists when a client on one server is associated with a one IP address, and on the other server with a different IP address in the same or a related subnet. This does not refer to the case where a single client has addresses in multiple dif- ferent subnets or administrative domains, but rather the case where on the same subnet the client has as lease on one IP address in one server and on a different IP address on the other server. This conflict may or may not be a problem for a given DHCP server implementation. In the event that a DHCP server requires that a DHCP client have only one outstanding lease for an IP Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 51] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 address on one subnet, this conflict should be resolved by accepting the update which has the latest client-last- transaction-time. o binding-status conflict This is normal conflict, where one server is updating the other with newer information. See section 7.1.3 for details of how to resolve these conflicts. 7.1.3. Deciding whether to accept the binding update transaction in a BNDUPD message IP addresses undergo binding status changes for several reasons, including receipt and processing of DHCP client requests, administra- tive inputs and receipt of BNDUPD messages. Every DHCP server needs to respond to DHCP client requests and administrative inputs with changes to its internal record of the binding-status of an IP address, and this response is not in the scope of the failover proto- col. However, the receipt of BNDUPD messages implies at least a pos- sible change of the binding-status for an IP address, and must be discussed here. See section 7.1.2 for general actions to take upon receipt of a BNDUPD message. When receiving a BNDUPD message, it is important to note that it may not be current, in that the server receiving the BNDUPD message may have had a more recent interaction with the DHCP client than its partner who sent the BNDUPD message. In this case, the receiving server MUST reject the BNDUPD message. In addition, it is worth not- ing that two (and possibly three) binding-status values are the direct result of interaction with a DHCP client, ACTIVE and RELEASED (and possibly ABANDONED). All other binding-status values are either the result of the expiration of a time period or interaction with an external agency (e.g., a network administrator). Every BNDUPD message SHOULD contain a client-last-transaction-time option, which MUST, if it appears, be the time that the server last interacted with the DHCP client. It MUST NOT be, for instance, the time that the lease on an IP address expired. If there has been no interaction with the DHCP client in question (or there is no DHCP client presently associated with this IP address), then there will be no client-last-transaction-time option in the BNDUPD message. The list in Figure 7.1.3-1 is indexed by the binding-status that a server receives in a BNDUPD message. In many cases, the binding- status of an IP address within the receiving server's data storage will have an affect upon the checks performed prior to accepting the new binding-status in a BNDUPD message. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 52] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 In Figure 7.1.3-1, to "accept" a BNDUPD means to update the server's bindings database with the information contained in the BNDUPD and once that update is complete, send a BNDACK message corresponding to the BNDUPD message. To "reject" a BNDUPD means to respond to the BNDUPD with a BNDACK with a reject-reason option included. When interpreting the rules in the following list, if a BNDUPD doesn't have a client-last-transaction-time value, then it MUST NOT be considered later than the client-last-transaction-time in the receiving server's binding. If the BNDUPD contains a client-last- transaction-time value and the receiving server's binding does not, then the client-last-transaction-time value in the BNDUPD MUST be considered later than the server's. The second rule concerns clients and IP addresses. If the clients in a BNDUPD message and in a receiving server's binding differ, then if the receiving server's binding-status is ACTIVE and the binding- status in the BNDUPD is ACTIVE, then if the receiving server is a secondary server accept it, else reject it. binding-status in received BNDUPD binding-status in receiving FREE RESET server ACTIVE EXPIRED RELEASED BACKUP ABANDONED ACTIVE accept time(2) time(1) time(2) accept EXPIRED time(1) accept accept accept accept RELEASED time(1) time(1) accept accept accept FREE/BACKUP accept accept accept accept accept RESET time(3) accept accept accept accept ABANDONED reject reject reject reject accept time(1): If the client-last-transaction-time in the BNDUPD is later than the client-last-transaction-time in the receiving server's binding, accept it, else reject it. time(2): If the current time is later than the receiving servers' lease-expiration-time, accept it, else reject it. time(3): If the client-last-transaction-time in the BNDUPD is later than the start-time-of-state in the receiving server's binding, accept it, else reject it. Figure 7.1.3-1: Accepting BNDUPD messages Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 53] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 7.1.4. Accepting the BNDUPD message When accepting a BNDUPD message, the information contained in the client-request-options and client-reply-options SHOULD be examined for any information of interest to this server. For instance, a server which wished to detect changes in client specified host names might want to examine and save information from the host-name or client-FQDN options. Servers which expect to utilize information from the relay-agent-information option would want to store this information. 7.1.5. Time values related to the BNDUPD message There are four time values that MAY be sent in a BNDUPD message. o lease-expiration-time The time that the server gave to the client, i.e., the time that the server believes that the client's lease will expire. o potential-expiration-time The time that the server wants to be sure its partner waits (added to the MCLT) before assuming that this lease has expired. Typically some time beyond the desired client lease time. o client-last-transaction-time The time that the client last interacted with this server. o start-time-of-state The time at which the binding first went into the current state. As discussed in section 5.2, each server knows what its partner has ACKed with regard to potential-expiration time. In addition, each server needs to remember what it has told its partner as the potential-expiration-time. Moreover, each server must remember what it has acked to the *other* server as the most recent potential- expiration-time from that server. Remember that each server sends a potential-expiration-time and receives an ACK for that as well as receiving a potential- expiration-time and needing to remember what it has acked for that. While they don't have to be named in any particular way, the times that a server needs to remember for every IP address in order to implement the failover protocol are: Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 54] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 o lease-expiration-time The time that a server gave to the DHCP client. A DHCP server needs to remember this time already, just to be a DHCP server. A server SHOULD update this time with the lease-expiration time received from a partner in a BNDUPD if the received lease- expiration time is later than the lease-expiration time recorded for this binding. o sent-potential-expiration-time The latest time sent to the partner for a potential-expiration- time. o acked-potential-expiration-time The latest time that the partner has acked for a potential expiration time. Typically the same as sent-potential- expiration-time if there is not a BNDUPD outstanding. o received-potential-expiration-time The latest time that this server has ever received as a potential-expiration-time from its partner in a BNDUPD that this server ACKed. So, a server has to remember two additional times concerning BNDUPD messages that it has initiated, and one additional time concerning BNDUPD message that it has received. How are these times used? First, let's look at the time that a DHCP server can offer to a DHCP client. A server can offer to a DHCP client a time that is no longer than the MCLT beyond the max( received-potential-expiration-time, acked-potential-expiration-time). One might think that the server should be able to offer only the MCLT beyond the acked-potential- expiration-time, and while that is certainly simple and easy to understand, it has negative consequences in actual operation. To illustrate this, in the simple case where the primary updates the secondary for a while and then fails, if the secondary can then renew the client for only the MCLT beyond the acked-potential-expiration- time, then the secondary will only be able to renew the client for the MCLT, because the secondary has never sent a BNDUPD packet to the primary concerning this IP address and client, and so its acked- potential-expiration-time is zero. However, since the secondary is allowed to renew the client with the MCLT beyond the max( received-potential-expiration-time, acked- Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 55] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 potential-expiration-time), then the secondary can usually renew the client for the full lease period, at least for the first renew it sees from the client, since the received-potential-expiration-time is generally longer than the client's desired lease interval. The difference in renew times could make a big difference in server load on the secondary in this case. What are the consequences of allowing a server to offer a DHCP client a lease term of the MCLT beyond the max( received-potential- expiration-time, acked-potential-expiration-time)? The consequences appear whenever a server enters PARTNER-DOWN state, and affect how long that server has to wait before reallocating expired leases. With this approach, when a server goes into PARTNER-DOWN state, it must wait the MCLT beyond the max( lease-expiration-time, sent- potential-expiration-time, acked-potential-expiration-time, received-potential-expiration-time ) for each IP address before it can reallocate that IP address to another DHCP client. One might normally think that it needed to wait only the MCLT beyond the max( lease-expiration-time, received-potential-expiration-time ), i.e., beyond what it has told the client and what it has explicitly acked to the other server. But with the optimization discussed above -- where either server can offer the DHCP client a lease term of the MCLT beyond the max( received-potential-expiration-time, acked- potential-expiration-time), then the additional times sent- potential-expiration-time and acked-potential-expiration-time must be added into the expression, since the partner could have used those times as part of its own lease time calculation. Thus this optimization may require a longer waiting time when enter- ing PARTNER-DOWN state, but will generally allow servers to operate considerably more effectively when running in COMMUNICATIONS- INTERRUPTED state. 7.2. BNDACK message [4] A server sends a binding acknowledgement (BNDACK) message when it has processed a BNDUPD message and after it has successfully committed to stable storage any binding database changes made as a result of pro- cessing the BNDUPD message. A BNDACK message is used to both accept or reject a BNDUPD message. A BNDACK message which contains a reject-reason option is a rejection of the corresponding BNDUPD mes- sage. In order to reduce the complexity of the discussion, the rest of this section is written as though every BNDUPD message contains only a single binding update transaction and thus every corresponding BNDACK message would also contain reply information about only a single binding update transaction. See section 6.3 for information on how Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 56] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 to create and process BNDUPD and BNDACK messages which contain multi- ple binding update transactions. Note that while a server MAY generate BNDUPD messages with multiple binding update transactions, every server MUST be able to process a BNDUPD message which contains multiple binding update transactions and generate the corresponding BNDACK messages with status for multi- ple binding update transactions. If a server does not ever create BNDUPD messages which contain multiple binding update transactions, then it does not need to be able to process a received BNDACK message with multiple binding update transactions. However, all servers MUST be able to create BNDACK messages which deal with multiple binding update transactions received in a BNDUPD message. Every BNDUPD message that is received by a server MUST be responded to with a corresponding BNDACK message. The receiving server SHOULD respond quickly to every BNDUPD message but it MAY choose to respond preferentially to DHCP client requests instead of BNDUPD messages, since there is no absolute time period within which a BNDACK must be sent in response to a BNDUPD message, while DHCP clients frequently have strict time constraints. A BNDACK message can only be sent in response to a BNDUPD message using the same TCP connection from which the BNDUPD message was received, since the XID's in BNDUPD messages are guaranteed unique only during the life of a single TCP connection. When a connection to a partner server goes down, a server with unprocessed BNDUPD mes- sages MAY simply drop all of those messages, since it can be sure that the partner will resend them when they are next in communica- tions (albeit with a different XID), or it MAY instead choose to pro- cess those BNDUPD messages, but it MUST NOT send any BNDACK messages in response. The following table summarizes the options for the BNDACK message. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 57] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 binding-status BACKUP RESET ABANDONED Option ACTIVE EXPIRED RELEASED FREE ------ ------ ------- -------- ---- assigned-IP-address (3) MUST MUST MUST MUST binding-status MUST MUST MUST MUST client-identifier MAY MAY MAY MAY(2) client-hardware-address MUST MUST MUST MAY(2) reject-reason MAY MAY MAY MAY message MAY MAY MAY MAY lease-expiration-time MUST MUST NOT MUST NOT MUST NOT potential-expiration-time MUST MUST NOT MUST NOT MUST NOT start-time-of-state SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD client-last-trans.-time SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD MAY DDNS(1) SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD SHOULD (1) MUST if server is performing dynamic DNS for this IP address, else MUST NOT. (2) MUST NOT if binding-status is ABANDONED. (3) assigned-IP-address MUST be the first option for an IP address Table 7.2-1: Options used in a BNDACK message 7.2.1. Sending the BNDACK message The BNDACK message MUST contain the same xid as the corresponding BNDUPD message. The assigned-IP-address option from the BNDUPD message MUST be included in the BNDACK message. Any additional options from the BNDUPD message SHOULD NOT appear in the BNDACK message. Note that any information sent in options (e.g, a later lease-expiration time) in the BNDACK message MUST NOT be assumed to necessarily be recorded in the stable storage of the server who receives the BNDACK message because there is no corresponding ACK of the BNDACK message. Any information that SHOULD be recorded in the partner server's stable storage MUST be transmitted in a subsequent BNDUPD. If the server is accepting the BNDUPD, the BNDACK message includes only the assigned-IP-address option. If the server is rejecting the BNDUPD, the additional option reject-reason MUST appear in the BNDACK message, and the message option SHOULD appear in this case containing a human-readable error message describing in some detail the reason for the rejection of the BNDUPD message. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 58] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 If the server rejects the BNDUPD message with a BNDACK and a reject- reason option, it may be because the server believes that it has binding information that the other server should know. A server which is rejecting a BNDUPD may initiate a BNDUPD of its own in order to update its partner with what it believes is better binding infor- mation, but it MUST ensure through some means that it will not end up in a situation where each server is sending BNDUPD messages as fast as possible because they can't agree on which server has better bind- ing data. Placing a considerable delay on the initiation of a BNDUPD message after sending a BNDACK with a reject-reason would be one way to ensure this situation doesn't occur. 7.2.2. Receiving the BNDACK message When a server receives a BNDACK message, if it doesn't contain a reject-reason option that means that the BNDUPD message was accepted, and the server which sent the BNDUPD SHOULD update its stable storage with the potential-expiration-time value sent in the BNDUPD message and returned in the BNDACK message. Other values sent in the BNDUPD message MAY be used as desired. If the BNDACK message contains a reject-reason option, that means that the BNDUPD was rejected. There SHOULD be a message option in the BNDACK giving a text reason for the rejection, and the server SHOULD log the message in some way. The server MUST NOT immediately try to resend the BNDUPD message as there is no reason to believe the partner won't reject it a second time. However a server MAY choose to send another BNDUPD at some future time, for instance when the server next processes an update request from its partner. 7.3. UPDREQ message [9] The update request (UPDREQ) message is used by one server to request that its partner send it all of the binding database information that it has not already seen. Since each server is required to keep track at all times of the binding information the other server has received and ACKed, one server can request transmission of all un- ACKed binding database information held by the other server by using the UPDREQ message. The UPDREQ message is used whenever the sending server cannot proceed before it has processed all previously un-ACKed binding update infor- mation, since the UPDREQ message should yield a corresponding UPDDONE message. The UPDDONE message is not sent until the server that sent the UPDREQ message has responded to all of the BNDUPD messages gen- erated by the UPDREQ message with BNDACK messages (they may either be accepted or rejected by the BNDACK messages, but they MUST have been responded to). Thus, the sender of the UPDREQ message can be sure Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 59] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 upon receipt of an UPDDONE message that it has received and committed to stable storage all outstanding binding database updates. See section 9, Failover Endpoint States, for the details of when the UPDREQ message is sent. 7.3.1. Sending the UPDREQ message The UPDREQ message has no message specific options. 7.3.2. Receiving the UPDREQ message A server receiving an UPDREQ message MUST send all binding database changes that have not yet been ACKed by the sending server. These changes are sent as undistinguished BNDUPD messages. However, the server which received and is processing the UPDREQ mes- sage MUST track the BNDACK messages that correspond to the BNDUPD messages triggered by the UPDREQ message and, when they are all received, the server MUST send an UPDDONE message. The server processing the UPDREQ message and sending BNDUPD messages to its partner SHOULD only track the BNDUPD and BNDACK message pairs for unACKed binding database changes that were present upon the receipt of the UPDREQ message. A server which has received an UPDREQ message SHOULD send BNDUPD messages for binding database changes that occur after receipt of the UPDREQ message, but it SHOULD NOT include those additional BNDUPD messages and their corresponding BNDACK mes- sages in the accounting necessary to consider the UPDREQ complete and subsequently send the UPDDONE message. If some additional binding database changes end up becoming part of the set of BNDUPD messages considered as part of the UPDREQ (due to whatever algorithm the server uses to scan its bindings database for unacked changes) it will probably not cause any difficulty, but a server MUST NOT attempt to include all such later BNDUPD messages in the accounting for the UPDREQ in order to be able to transmit an UPDDONE message. When queuing up the BNDUPD messages for transmission to the sender of the UPDREQ message, the server processing the UPDREQ message MUST honor the value returned in the max-unacked-bndupd option in the CON- NECT or CONNECTACK message that set up the connection with the send- ing server. It MUST NOT send more BNDUPD messages without receiving corresponding BNDACKs than the value returned in max-unacked-bndupd. 7.4. UPDREQALL message [7] The update request all (UPDREQALL) message is used by one server to request that its partner send it all of the binding database Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 60] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 information. This message is used to allow one server to recover from a failure of stable storage and to restore its binding database in its entirety from the other server. A server which sends an UPDREQALL message cannot proceed until all of its binding update information is restored, and it knows that all of that information is restored when an UPDDONE message is received. See section 9, Protocol state transitions, for the details of when the UPDREQALL message is sent. The UPDREQALL message has no message specific options. 7.4.1. Sending the UPDREQALL message The UPDREQALL is sent. 7.4.2. Receiving the UPDREQALL message A server receiving an UPDREQALL message MUST send all binding data- base information to the sending server. These changes are sent as undistinguished BNDUPD messages. Otherwise the processing is the same as for the UPDREQ message. See section 7.3.2 for details. 7.5. UPDDONE message [8] The update done (UPDDONE) message is used by a server receiving an UPDREQ or UPDREQALL message to signify that it has sent all of the BNDUPD messages requested by the UPDREQ or UPDREQALL request and that it has received a BNDACK for each of those messages. While a BNDACK message MUST have been received for each BNDUPD mes- sage prior to the transmission of the UPDDONE message, this doesn't necessarily mean that all of the BNDUPD messages were accepted, only that all of them were responded to with a BNDACK message. Thus, a NAK (comprised of a BNDACK message containing a reject-reason option) could be used to reject a BNDUPD, but for the purposes of the UPDDONE message, such NAK would count as a response to the associated BNDUPD message, and would not block the eventual transmission of the UPDDONE message. The xid in an UPDDONE message MUST be identical to the xid in the UPDREQ or UPDREQALL message that initiated the update process. The UPDDONE message has no message specific options. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 61] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 7.5.1. Sending the UPDDONE message The UPDDONE message SHOULD be sent as soon as the last BNDACK message corresponding to a BNDUPD message requested by the UPDREQ or UPDREQALL is received from the server which sent the UPDREQ or UPDREQALL. The XID of the UPDDONE message MUST be the same as the XID of the corresponding UPDREQ or UPDREQALL message. 7.5.2. Receiving the UPDDONE message A server receiving the UPDDONE message knows that all of the informa- tion that it requested by sending an UPDREQ or UPDREQALL message has now been sent and that it has recorded this information in its stable storage. It typically uses the receipt of an UPDDONE message to move to a different failover state. See sections 9.5.2 and 9.8.3 for details. 7.6. POOLREQ message [1] The pool request (POOLREQ) message is used by the secondary server to request an allocation of IP addresses from the primary server. It MUST be sent by a secondary server to a primary server to request IP address allocation by the primary. The IP addresses allocated are transmitted using normal BNDUPD messages from the primary to the secondary. The POOLREQ message SHOULD be sent from the secondary to the primary whenever the secondary transitions into NORMAL state. It SHOULD periodically be resent in order that any change in the number of available IP addresses on the primary be reflected in the pool on the secondary. The period may be influenced by the secondary server's leasing activity. The POOLREQ message has no message specific options. 7.6.1. Sending the POOLREQ message The POOLREQ message is sent. 7.6.2. Receiving the POOLREQ message When a primary server receives a POOLREQ message it SHOULD examine the binding database and determine how many IP addresses the secon- dary server should have, and set these IP addresses to BACKUP state. It SHOULD then send BNDUPD messages concerning all of these IP addresses to the secondary server. Servers frequently have several kinds of IP addresses available on a Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 62] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 particular network segment. The failover protocol assumes that both primary and secondary servers are configured in such a way that each knows the type and number of IP addresses on every network segment participating in the failover protocol. The primary server is responsible for allocating the secondary server the correct propor- tion of available IP addresses of each kind, and the secondary server is responsible for being configured in such a way that it can tell the kind of every IP address based solely on the IP address itself. A primary server MUST keep track of how many IP addresses were allo- cated as a result of processing the POOLREQ message, and send that number in the POOLRESP message. A primary server MAY choose to defer processing a POOLREQ message until a more convenient time to process it, but it should not depend on the secondary server to resend the POOLREQ message in that case. If a secondary server receives a POOLREQ message it SHOULD report an error. 7.7. POOLRESP message [2] A primary server sends a POOLRESP message to a secondary server after the allocation process for available addresses to the secondary server is complete. Typically this message will precede some of the BNDUPD messages that the primary uses to send the actual allocated IP addresses to the secondary. The xid in the POOLRESP message MUST be identical to the xid in the POOLREQ message for which this POOLRESP is a response. 7.7.1. Sending the POOLRESP message The POOLRESP message MUST contain the same xid as the corresponding POOLREQ message. Only one option MUST appear in a POOLREQ message: o addresses-transferred The number of addresses allocated to the secondary server by the primary server as a result of a POOLREQ is contained in the addresses-transferred option in a POOLRESP message. Note this is the number of addresses that are transferred to the secondary in the primary's binding database as a result of the correspond- ing POOLREQ message, and that it may be some time before they can all be transmitted to the secondary server through the use Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 63] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 of BNDUPD messages. 7.7.2. Receiving the POOLRESP message When a secondary server receives a POOLRESP message, it SHOULD send another POOLREQ message if the value of the addresses-transferred option is non-zero. Typically, no other action is taken on the reception of a POOLRESP message. 7.8. CONNECT message [5] The connect message is used to establish an applications level con- nection over a newly created TCP connection. It gives the source information for the connection, and critical configuration informa- tion. It MUST be sent only by the primary server. Either server can initiate a TCP connection, but the CONNECT message is only sent by the primary server. The CONNECT message MUST be the first message sent down a newly esta- blished connection, and it MUST be sent only by the primary server. The following table summarizes the options that are associated with the CONNECT message: Option ------ sending-server-IP-address MUST max-unacked-bndupd MUST receive-timer MUST vendor-class-identifier MUST protocol-version MUST TLS-request MUST (1) MCLT MUST hash-bucket-assignment MUST (1) MUST NOT if CONNECT is being sent over a TLS connection Table 7.8-1: Options used in a CONNECT message 7.8.1. Sending the CONNECT message The CONNECT message MUST be the first message sent by the primary server after the establishment of a new TCP connection with a secon- dary server participating in the failover protocol. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 64] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 The xid of the CONNECT message must be unique. The IP address of the primary server MUST be placed in the sending- server-IP-address option. This information is placed in an option inside of the message in order to allow the identity of the sender to be covered by a shared secret. The number of BNDUPD messages the primary server can accept without blocking the TCP connection MUST be placed in the max-unacked-bndupd option. This MUST be a number equal to or greater than 1, SHOULD be a number greater than 10, and SHOULD be a number less than 100. The length of the receive timer (tReceive, see section 8.3) MUST be placed in the receive-timer option. The MCLT MUST be placed in the MCLT option. The hash-bucket-assignment option MUST be included in the CONNECT message. In the event that load balancing is not configured for this server, the hash-bucket-assignment option will indicate that. The value of the hash-bucket-assignment option is determined from the specific buckets that the primary server has determined that the secondary server MUST service as part of the load-balancing algo- rithm. The way in which the primary server determines this informa- tion is outside the scope of this protocol definition. The primary server SHOULD be configured with a percentage of clients that the secondary server will be instructed to service, and the primary server SHOULD use the algorithm in [LOADB] to generate a Hash Bucket Assignment which it sends to the secondary server. The vendor class identifier MUST be placed in the vendor-class- identifier option. The protocol-version option MUST be included in every CONNECT mes- sage. The current value of the protocol version is 1. The TLS-request option MUST be sent and contains the desired TLS con- nection request as well as information concerning whether TLS is sup- ported. If this CONNECT message is being sent over a already created TLS connection, the TLS-request MUST NOT appear. 7.8.2. Receiving the CONNECT message When a server receives a TCP connection on the failover port, if it is a PRIMARY server it should send a CONNECT message, and if it is a secondary server it should wait for a CONNECT message before sending any messages. To avoid denial of service attacks, a secondary should only wait for a CONNECT message on a new connection for a limited Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 65] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 amount of time and close the connection if none is received during that time. When a secondary server receives a CONNECT message it should: 1. Record the time at which the message was received. 2. Examine the protocol-version option, and decide if this server is capable of interoperating with another server running that protocol version. If not, send the CONNECTACK message with the appropriate reject-reason. The server MUST include its protocol-version in the CONNECTACK message. 3. Examine the TLS-request option. Figure out the TLS-reply value based on the capabilities and configuration of this server. If the result for the TLS-reply value is a 1 and the connection is accepted, indicating use of TLS, then immedi- ately send the CONNECTACK message and go into TLS negotiation. If the TLS-reply value implies rejection of the connection, then immediately send the CONNECTACK message with the TLS- reply value and the appropriate reject-reason option value. In all other cases, save the TLS-reply option information for the eventual CONNECTACK message. The possibilities for TLS-request and TLS-reply are: CONNECT CONNECTACK TLS TLS request reply Reject t1 t1 Reason Comments -- -- ------ -------- 0 0 no TLS used 0 1 11 primary won't use TLS, secondary requires TLS 1 0 primary desires TLS, secondary doesn't 1 1 primary desires TLS, secondary will use TLS 2 0 9, 10 primary requires TLS and secondary won't 2 1 primary requires TLS and secondary will use TLS 4. Check to see if there is a message-digest option in the CON- NECT message. If there was, and the server does not support message-digests, then reject the connection with the appropri- ate reject-reason in the CONNECTACK. If the server does sup- port message-digests, then check this message for validity based on the message-digest, and reject it if the digest indi- cates the message was altered. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 66] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 5. Determine if the sender (from the sending-server-IP-address option) and the implicit role of the sender (i.e., primary) represents a server with which the receiver was configured to engage in failover activity. This is performed after any TLS or message digest processing so that it occurs after a secure connection is created, to ensure that there is no tampering with the IP address of the partner. If not, then the receiving server should reject the CONNECT request by sending a CONNECTACK message with a reject-reason value of: 8, invalid failover partner. If it is, then the receiving failover endpoint should be determined. 6. Decide if the time delta between the sending of the message, in the time field, and the receipt of the message, recorded in step 1 above, is acceptable. A server MAY require an arbi- trarily small delta in time values in order to set up a fail- over connection with another server. See section 5.9 for information on time synchronization. If the delta between the time values is too great, the server should reject the CONNECT request by sending a CONNECTACK mes- sage with a reject-reason of 4, time mismatch too great. If the time mismatch is not considered too great then the receiving server MUST record the delta between the servers. The receiving server MUST use this delta to correct all of the absolute times received from the other server in all time- valued options. Note that servers can participate in failover with arbitrarily great time mismatches, as long as it is more or less constant. 7. Examine the MCLT option in the CONNECT request and use the value of the MCLT as the MCLT for this failover endpoint. The secondary server SHOULD be able to operate with any MCLT sent by the primary, but if it cannot, then it should send a CONNECTACK with a reject-reason of 5, MCLT mismatch. 8. The server MUST store hash-bucket-assignment option for use during processing during NORMAL state. If this hash bucket assignment conflicts with the secondary server's configured hash bucket assignment for use in other than NORMAL state, the secondary server should send a CONNECTACK with a reject reason of 19, Hash bucket assignment conflict. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 67] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 9. The receiving server MAY use the vendor-class-identifier to do vendor specific processing. 7.9. CONNECTACK message [6] The CONNECTACK message is sent to accept or reject a CONNECT message. It is sent by the secondary server which received a CONNECT message. Attempting immediately to reconnect after either receiving a CONNEC- TACK with a reject-reason or after sending a CONNECTACK with a reject-reason could yield unwanted looping behavior, since the reason that the connection was rejected may well not have changed since the last attempt. A simple suggested solution is to wait a minute or two after sending or receiving a CONNECTACK message with a reject-reason before attempting to reestablish communication. The following table summarizes the options associated with the CON- NECTACK message: Option ------ sending-server-IP-address MUST max-unacked-bndupd MUST receive-timer MUST vendor-class-identifier MUST protocol-version MUST TLS-request MUST(1) reject-reason MAY(2) message MAY MCLT MUST NOT hash-bucket-assignment MUST NOT (1) MUST NOT if sending CONNECTACK after TLS negotiation (2) Indicates a rejection of the CONNECT message. Table 7.9-1: Options used in a CONNECTACK message 7.9.1. Sending the CONNECTACK message The xid of the CONNECTACK message MUST be that of the corresponding CONNECT message. The IP address of the sending server MUST be placed in the sending- server-IP-address option. This information is placed in an option inside of the message in order to allow the identity of the sender to be covered by a shared secret. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 68] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 The protocol-version option MUST be included in every CONNECTACK mes- sage. The current value of the protocol version is 1. If the connection has been rejected, the reject-reason option MUST be placed in the CONNECTACK message with an appropriate reason, and a message option SHOULD be included with a human-readable error message describing the reason for the rejection in some detail. If the reject-reason option appears, then the remaining options listed below do not appear. The sending server should close the connection after sending the CONNECTACK if the connection was rejected. The results of the TLS negotiation MUST be placed in the TLS-reply option. If this CONNECTACK message is being sent over an already TLS secured connection, then there MUST NOT be a TLS-reply option. If there was a message-digest option in the CONNECT message, then there MUST be a message-digest in the CONNECTACK message and any sub- sequent messages if the CONNECTACK does not contain a reject-reason. The number of BNDUPD messages the server can accept without blocking the TCP connection MUST be placed in the max-unacked-bndupd option. This SHOULD be a number greater than 10, and SHOULD be a number less than 100. The length of the receive timer (tReceive, see section 8.3) MUST be placed in the receive-timer option. The vendor class identifier MUST be placed in the vendor-class- identifier option. After a connection is created (either by sending a CONNECTACK message to the first CONNECT message, or sending a CONNECTACK message to a CONNECT message received over a TLS connection), the server MUST send a STATE message. After a connection is created, the server MUST start two timers for the connection: tSend and tReceive. The tSend timer SHOULD be approximately 33 percent of the time in the receiver-timer option in the corresponding CONNECT message. The tReceive timer SHOULD be the time sent in the receiver-timer option in the CONNECTACK message. The tReceive timer is reset whenever a message is received from this TCP connection. If it ever expires, the TCP connection is dropped and communications with this partner is considered not ok. The tSend timer is reset whenever a message is sent over this connec- tion. When it expires, a CONTACT message MUST be sent. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 69] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 7.9.2. Receiving the CONNECTACK message If a CONNECTACK message is received with a different XID from the one in the CONNECT that was sent, it SHOULD be ignored. When a CONNECTACK message is received, the following actions should be taken: 1. Record the time the message was received. 2. Check to see if the xid on the CONNECTACK matches an outstand- ing CONNECT message on this TCP connection. 3. Check to see if there is a reject-reason option in the CONNEC- TACK message. If not, continue with step 3. If there is a reject-reason option, the server SHOULD report the error code. If a message option appears a server SHOULD display the string from the message option in a user visible way. The server MUST close the connection if a reject-reason option appears. 4. Check the value of the TLS-reply option (if any, which there won't be if this CONNECT is taking place utilizing TLS), and if it was 1, then skip processing of the rest of the CONNEC- TACK message, and immediately enter into TLS connection setup. This step occurs prior to steps 5 and 6 in order to allow creation of a secure connection (if required) prior to pro- cessing the protocol version and IP address information. 5. Examine the value of the protocol-version option. If this server is able to establish connections with another server running this protocol version, then continue, else close the connection. 6. Decide if the time delta between the sending of the message, in the time field, and the receipt of the message, recorded in step 1 above, is acceptable. A server MAY require an arbi- trarily small delta in time values in order to set up a fail- over connection with another server. If the delta between the time values is too great, the server should drop the TCP connection. If the time mismatch is not considered too great then the receiving server MUST record the delta between the servers. The receiving server MUST use this delta to correct all of the absolute times received from the other server in all time- valued options. Note that the failover protocol is Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 70] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 constructed so that two servers can be failover partners with arbitrarily great time mismatches. 7. The receiving server MAY use the vendor-class-identifier to do vendor specific processing. 8. After accepting a CONNECTACK message, the server MUST send a STATE message. After receiving a CONNECTACK message, the server MUST start two timers for the connection: tSend and tReceive. The tSend timer SHOULD be approximately 20 percent of the time in the receiver-timer option in the corresponding CONNECTACK message. The tReceive timer SHOULD be set to the time sent in the receiver-timer option in the CONNECT message. The tReceive timer is reset whenever a message is received from this TCP connection. If it ever expires, the TCP connec- tion is dropped and communications with this partner is con- sidered not ok. The tSend timer is reset whenever a message is sent over this connection. When it expires, a CONTACT message MUST be sent. 7.10. STATE message [10] The state (STATE) message is used to communicate the current failover state to the partner server. The STATE message MUST be sent after sending a CONNECTACK message that didn't contain a reject-reason option, and MUST be sent after receiving a CONNECTACK message without a reject-reason option. A STATE message MUST be sent whenever the failover endpoint changes its failover state and a connection exists to the partner. The STATE message requires no response from the failover partner. The following table shows the options that MUST appear in a STATE message: Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 71] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 Option ------ sending-state MUST server-flags MUST start-time-of-state MUST Table 7.10-1: Options used in a STATE message 7.10.1. Sending the STATE message The current failover state is placed in the server-state option and the current state of the STARTUP flag is placed in the server-flags option. The message is sent with a unique xid. A server SHOULD only send the STATE message either when the connec- tion is created (i.e, after sending or receiving a CONNECTACK message with no reject-reason option), or when there is a change from the values sent in a previous STATE message. 7.10.2. Receiving the STATE message Every STATE message SHOULD indicate a change in state or a change in the flags. When a STATE message is received, any state transitions specified in section 9 are taken. No response to a STATE message is required. 7.11. CONTACT message [11] The contact (CONTACT) message is sent to verify communications integrity with a failover partner. The CONTACT message is sent when no messages have been sent to the failover partner for a specified period of time. This is determined by the tSend timer expiring (see section 8.3). The CONTACT message has no message specific options. 7.11.1. Sending the CONTACT message The CONTACT message is sent. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 72] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 7.11.2. Receiving the CONTACT message When a CONTACT message is received, the tReceive timer is reset (as it is with any message that is received). A server SHOULD use the time in the time field and the time the mes- sage was received to refine the delta time calculations between the servers. 7.12. DISCONNECT message [12] The DISCONNECT is the last message sent over a connection before dropping an established connection (note that an established connec- tion is one where a CONNECTACK has been sent without a reject rea- son). After sending or receiving a DISCONNECT message, a server needs to have some mechanism to prevent an error loop. Simply reconnecting to the partner immediately is not the best option, especially after several consecutive attempts. A simple suggested solution is to wait a minute or two after sending or receiving a DISCONNECT before attempting to reestablish communica- tion. The DISCONNECT message MUST be the last message sent down a connec- tion before it is closed. The following table summarizes the options that are associated with the DISCONNECT message: Option ------ reject-reason MUST message SHOULD Table 7.12-1: Options used in a DISCONNECT message 7.12.1. Sending the DISCONNECT message The DISCONNECT message MUST be the last message sent by the a server which is dropping a TCP connection. The xid of the DISCONNECT message must be unique. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 73] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 The reject-reason option MUST appear giving a reason why the connec- tion was dropped. A message option SHOULD appear giving a human readable error message with possibly more details. 7.12.2. Receiving the DISCONNECT message When a server receives a DISCONNECT message it should log the message if there was one and possibly raise an alarm of some sort if the reject reason was one that was sufficiently serious. 8. Connection Management Servers participating in the failover protocol communicate over TCP connections. These TCP connections are used both to transmit bind- ing information from one server to another as well as to allow each server to determine whether communications is possible with the other server. Central to the operation of the failover protocol is a notion of "communications okay" or "communications failed". Failover state transitions are taken in many cases when the status of communications with the partner changes, and the existence or non-existence of a TCP connections between failover endpoints is used to determine if com- munications is "okay" or "failed". A single TCP connection exists which connects two failover endpoints. 8.1. Connection granularity There exists one TCP connection between each set of failover end- points. See section 5.1.1 for an explanation of failover endpoints. There are a maximum of two TCP connections between any two servers implementing the failover protocol, one for each of the possible failover endpoints between these two servers. There is a minimum of one TCP connection between one server and every other failover server with which it implements the failover protocol. 8.2. Creating the TCP connection There are two ports used for initiating TCP connections, correspond- ing to the two roles that a server can fill with respect to another server. Every server implementing the failover protcol MUST listen on at least one of these ports. Port 647 is the port to which pri- mary servers will attempt a connection, and port TBD is the port to which secondary servers will attempt a connection. When a connection attempt is received on port 647 it is therefore from a primary server, and it is attempting to connect to this server to become a Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 74] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 secondary server for it. Likewise, when an attempt to connect is received on port TBD the connection attempt is from a secondary server, and it is attempting to connect to this server to be a pri- mary server. The source port of any TCP connection is unimportant. See the schematic representation below: Primary Server -------------- Listens on port TBD for secondary server to connect to it Periodically connects on port 647 to contact secondary Secondary Server -------------- Listens on port 647 for primary server to connect to it Periodically connects on port TDB to contact primary Every server implementing the failover protocol SHOULD attempt to connect to all of its partners periodically, where the period is implementation dependent and SHOULD be configurable. In the event that a connection has been rejected by a CONNECTACK message with a reject-reason option contained in it or a DISCONNECT message, a server SHOULD reduce the frequency with which it attempts to connect to that server but it SHOULD continue to attempt to connect periodi- cally. If a connection attempt has been received from another server in a particular role (i.e., from a specific failover endpoint) then the receiving server MUST NOT initiate a connection attempt to the partner server in that same role. If both servers happen to attempt to connect simultaneously, the secondary server MUST drop its attempt in favor of the primary's attempt. Thus, in the event that a secondary server receives a con- nection attempt to port 647 from a primary server when it has already initiated a connection attempt to port TBD on the same primary server, it MUST accept the connection to port 647 and it MUST drop drop the connection attempt to port TBD. In the event that a primary server receives a connection attempt to port TBD from a secondary server when it has already initiated a connection attempt to port 647 on that same server, it MUST reject the connection attempt to port TBD and continue to pursue the connection attempt on port 647. Once a connection is established, the primary server MUST send a CON- NECT message across the connection. A secondary server MUST wait for the CONNECT message from a primary server. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 75] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 Every CONNECT message includes a TLS-request option, and if the CON- NECTACK message does not reject the CONNECT message and the TLS-reply option says TLS MUST be used, then the servers will immediately enter into TLS negotiation. Once TLS negotiation is complete, the primary server MUST resend the CONNECT message on the newly secured TLS connection and then wait for the CONNECTACK message in response. The TLS-request and TLS-reply options MUST NOT appear in either this second CONNECT or its associ- ated CONNECTACK message as they had in the first messages. The second message sent over a new connection (either a bare TCP con- nection or a connection utilizing TLS) is a STATE message. Upon the receipt of this message, the receiver can consider communications up. It is entirely possible that two servers will attempt to make connec- tions to each other essentially simultaneously, and in this case the secondary server will be waiting for a CONNECT message on each con- nection. The primary server MUST send a CONNECT message over one connection and it MUST close the other connection. A secondary server MUST NOT respond to the closing of a TCP connec- tion with a blind attempt to reconnect -- there may be another TCP connection to the same failover partner already in use. 8.3. Using the TCP connection for determining communications status The TCP connection is used to determine the communications status of the other server, i.e., communications-ok, or communications- interrupted. Three things must happen for a server to consider that communications are ok with respect to another server: 1. A TCP connection must be established to the other server. 2. A CONNECT message must be received and a CONNECTACK message sent in response. The CONNECT message is used to determine the identify of the failover endpoint of the other end of the TCP connection -- without it, the failover endpoint cannot be uniquely determined. Without knowledge of the failover end- point, then the entity with which communications is ok is undetermined. 3. A STATE message must be received from the other server over the connection. This STATE message initializes important information necessary to the operation of the state machine Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 76] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 the governs the behavior of this failover endpoint. There are two ways that a server can determine that communications has failed: 1. The TCP connection can go down, yielding an error when attempting to send or receive a message. This will happen at least as often as the period of the tSend timer. 2. The tReceive timer can expire. In either of these cases, communications is considered interrupted. Several difficulties arise when trying to use one TCP connection for both bulk data transfer as well as to sense the communications status of the other server. One aspect of the problem stems from the dif- ferent requirements of both uses. The bulk data transfer is of course critically important to the protocol, but the speed with which it is processed is not terribly significant. It might well be minutes before a BNDUPD message is processed, and while not optimal, such an occasional delay doesn't compromise the correctness of the protocol. However, the speed with which one server detects the other server is up (or, more importantly, down) is more highly constrained. Generally one server should be able to detect that the other server is not communicating within a minute or less. These differing time constraints makes it difficult to use the same TCP connection for data transfer as well as to sense communications integrity. See section 3.5 for additional details on TCP. The solution to this problem is to require that some message be received by each end of the connection within a limited time or that the connection will be considered down. If no messages have been sent recently, then a CONTACT message is sent. In the case where there is no data queued to be sent, this is not a problem, but in the case where there is data queued to be sent to the partner, then the CONTACT message will not actually be transmitted until the queued data is sent. Section 3.5 explains why waiting for TCP to determine that the connection is down is not acceptable, and leads a requirement that the receiving server never block the sending server from sending CONTACT messages. In order to meet this requirement, each server tells the other server the number of outstanding BNDUPD messages that it will accept. The receiving server is required to always be able to accept that many BNDUPD messages off of the connection's input queue even if it cannot Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 77] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 process them immediately, and to accept all other messages immedi- ately. Thus, the sending server's TCP is never blocked from sending a mes- sage except for very short periods, less than a few seconds unless the network connection itself has problems. In this case, if the CONTACT messages don't make it to the partner then the partner will close the connection. DISCUSSION: When implementing this capability, one needs to be careful when sending any message on the TCP connection as TCP can easily block the server if the local TCP send buffers are full. This can't be prevented because if the receiver is not reachable (via the net- work), the sending TCP can't send and thus it will be unable to empty the local TCP send buffers. So, all send operations either need to assume they may block for some time or non-blocking sends must be used. 8.4. Using the TCP connection for binding data Binding data, in the form of BNDUPD messages and BNDACK messages to respond to them, are sent across the TCP connection. In order to support timely detection of any failure in the partner server, the TCP connection MUST NOT block for more than a very short time, on the order of a few seconds. Therefore, a server that is sending BNDUPD messages MUST send only a restricted number before receiving BNDACK messages about previous messages sent. The number of outstanding BNDUPD messages that each server will accept without causing TCP to block transmission of additional data (i.e, CONTACT messages) is sent by each server in the CONNECT and CONNECTACK messages in the max-unacked-bndupd option. 8.5. Using the TCP connection for control messages The TCP connection is used for control messages: POOLREQ, UPDREQ, STATE, CONTACT, UPDREQALL and the corresponding reply messages: POOL- RESP, UPDDONE. A server MUST immediately accept all of these mes- sages from the TCP connection. A server MUST immediately accept any BNDACK which is received as well. 8.6. Losing the TCP connection When the TCP connection is lost, then communications is not ok with the other server. A server which has lost communications SHOULD Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 78] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 immediately attempt to reconnect to the other server, and should retry these connection attempts periodically. An acknowledgement message (BNDACK, POOLRESP, UPDDONE) message can only be sent in response to a request message (BNDUPD, POOLREQ, UPDREQ, UPDREQALL) on the same TCP connection from which the request was received, in part since the XID's in the request messages are guaranteed unique only during the life of a single TCP connection. When a connection to a partner server goes down, a server with unpro- cessed request messages MAY simply drop all of those messages, since it can be sure that the partner will resend them when they are next in communications. A server with unprocessed BNDUPD messages when a TCP connection goes down MAY instead choose to process those BNDUPD messages, but it MUST NOT send any BNDACK messages in response (again because of the issues surrounding XID uniqueness). When the TCP connection is closed explicitly, the DISCONNECT message with a reject-reason option (and, ideally, a message option) MUST be sent over the TCP connection. 9. Failover Endpoint States This section discusses the various states that a failover endpoint may take, and the server actions required when entering the state, operating in the state, and leaving the state, as well as the events that cause transitions out of the state into another state. The state transition diagram in Figure 9.2-1 is relevant for this section. This is the common state transition diagram for both servers in a failover pair. In the event that the textual description of a state differs from the state transition diagram, the textual descrip- tion is to be considered authoritative. 9.1. Server Initialization When a server starts it starts out in STARTUP state. See section 9.3 below for details. 9.2. Server State Transitions Whenever a server transitions into a new state, it MUST record the state and the time at which it entered that state in stable storage. If communications is "ok", it MUST also send a STATE message to its failover partner. Figure 9.2-1 is the diagram of the server state transitions. The remainder of this section contains information important to the Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 79] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 understanding of that diagram. The server stays in the current state until all of the actions speci- fied on the state transition are complete. If communications fails during one of the actions, the server simply stays in the current state and attempts a transition whenever the conditions for a transi- tion are later fulfilled. In the state transition diagram below, the "+" or "-" in the upper right corner of each state is a notation about whether communication is ongoing with the other server. The legend "responsive", "balanced", or "unresponsive" in each state indicates whether the server is responsive to all DHCP client requests, running in load balanced mode, or totally unresponsive in the respective state. The terms "responsive" and "unresponsive" have the obvious meanings, while "balanced" means that a DHCP server may respond to all DHCPREQUEST messages that are RENEWAL or REBINDING, and to all other messages from clients for which the load balancing algorithm indicates that it MUST respond to. See sections 5.3 and 9.6.2 for details on load balancing. In the state transition diagram below, when communication is reesta- blished between the two servers, each must record the state of the partner when communication was restored. State transitions on one server in some cases imply state transitions on the partner server, so a record of the current state of the partner server must be kept by each server. If the state of the partner changes while communicating a server moves through the communications-failed transition and into whatever state results. It then immediately moves through whatever state transition is appropriate given the current state of the partner server. A server performing this operation SHOULD NOT close the TCP connection to its partner. DISCUSSION: The point of this technique is simplicity, both in explanation of the protocol and in its implementation. The alternative to this technique of memory of partner state and automatic state transi- tion on change of partner state is to have every state in the fol- lowing diagram have a state transition for every possible state of the partner. With the approach adopted, only the states in which communications are reestablished require a state transition for each possible partner state. The current state of a server MUST be recorded in stable storage and Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 80] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 thus be available to the server after a server restart. +---------------+ V +--------------+ | RECOVER - | | | STARTUP - | |(unresponsive) | +->|(unresponsive)| +---------------+ +--------------+ Comm. OK +-----------------+ Other State:-RECOVER | PARTNER DOWN - |<-----------------+ | | | (responsive) | | All POTENTIAL- +-----------------+ +--------------+ | Others CONFLICT------------ | --------+ | RESOLUTION -| | | Comm. OK | | INTERRUPTED | | UPDREQ(ALL) Other State: | +-| (responsive) | | Wait UPDDONE | | | | +--------------+ | Wait MCLT from fail RECOVER All Others| Comm. OK ^ | | +--------------+ | V V V | Ext. | |RECOVER-DONE +| +--+ +--------------+ Comm. Cmd. | |(unresponsive)| | | POTENTIAL + | Failed | | +--------------+ Wait for +>| CONFLICT |------+ +-->| Comm. OK Other | |(unresponsive)|<--------+ | +--Other State:-+ State: | +--------------+ | | | | | RECOVER | | | | | All POTENT. DONE | Resolve Conflict | | | Others: CONFLICT-- | ----+ (see 9.8) | | | Wait for V V | | | Other State: NORMAL +-----------------+ | | | V | NORMAL + | External | | | +--+----------+-->| (balanced) |-Command---+-- | -----+ | ^ ^ +-----------------+ | | | | | | | | | Wait for Comm. OK Comm. External | | Other Other Failed Command | | State: State: | or | | |RECOVER-DONE NORMAL Start Safe Safe | | | | COMM. INT. Period Timer Period | | | Comm. OK. | V expiration | | Other State: | +------------------+ | | | RECOVER +--| COMMUNICATIONS - |-----------+ | V +-------------| INTERRUPTED | Comm. OK | RECOVER | (responsive) |--Other State:-+ RECOVER-DONE--------->+------------------+ All Others Figure 9.2-1: Server state diagram. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 81] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 9.3. STARTUP state The STARTUP state affords an opportunity for a server to probe its partner server, before starting to service DHCP clients. DISCUSSION: Without the STARTUP state, a server would likely start in a state derived from its previously stored state (held in stable storage), if any. However, this may be inconsistent with the current state of the partner. The STARTUP state affords the opportunity for a server to potentially learn the partner's state and determine if that state is consistent with its derived starting state or whether some significant state change has occurred at the partner that forces the server to start in another state. This is especially critical if significant time has elapsed while the server was down. 9.3.1. Operation while in STARTUP state Whenever a server is in STARTUP state, it MUST be unresponsive to DHCP client requests, and so the time spent in the STARTUP state is necessarily short, typically on the order of a few seconds to a few tens of seconds. The exact time spent in the STARTUP state is imple- mentation dependent, and the primary and secondary server are not required to spend the same amount of time in the STARTUP state. Whenever a STATE message is sent to the partner while in STARTUP state the STARTUP bit MUST be set in the server-flags option and the previously recorded failover state MUST be placed in the server-state option. 9.3.2. Transition out of STARTUP state Each server starts out in startup state every time it initializes itself, and performs the following algorithm as part of its initiali- zation: 1. Is there any record in stable storage of a previous failover state? If yes, set previous-state to the last recorded state in stable storage, and continue with step 2. Is there any configuration information that indicates that this server was previously running but lost its stable storage? Such information must typically come from some Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 82] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 administrative intervention, since it is difficult for a server to distinguish first startup from a startup after it has lost its stable storage. If yes, then set the previous- state to RECOVER, and set the time-of-failure to whatever time was configured, and go on to step 2. This time-of-failure will be used in the transition out of the RECOVER state into the RECOVER-DONE state, below. If there is no record of any previous failover state in stable storage nor of any previous operational activity for this server, then set the previous-state to PARTNER-DOWN if this server is a primary and RECOVER if this server is a secondary, and set the time-of-failure to a time before the maximum- client-lead-time before now. If using standard Posix times, 0 would typically do quite well. 2. Is the previous-state NORMAL? If yes, set the previous-state to COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED. 3. Start the STARTUP state timer. The time that a server remains in the STARTUP state (absent any communications with its partner) is implementation dependent and SHOULD be configur- able. It SHOULD be long enough for a TCP connection to be created to a heavily loaded partner across a slow network. 4. Attempt to create a TCP connection to the failover partner. See section 8.2. 5. Wait for "communications okay", i.e., the process discussed in section 8.2 "Creating the TCP Connection", to complete, including the receipt of a STATE message from the partner. When and if communications become "okay", clear the STARTUP flag, and set the current state to the previous-state. If the partner is in PARTNER-DOWN state, and if the time at which it entered PARTNER-DOWN state (as received in the start-time-of-state option in the STATE message) is later than the last recorded time of operation of this server, then set the current state to RECOVER. If the time at which it entered PARTNER-DOWN state is earlier than the last recorded time of operation of this server, then set the current state to POTENTIAL-CONFLICT. Then, transition to the current state and take the "communica- tions okay" state transition based on the current state of this server and the partner. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 83] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 7. If the startup time expires, take an implementation dependent action: The server MAY go to the previous-state, or the server MAY wait. Reasons to go to previous-state and begin processing: If the current server is the only operational server, then if it waits, there will be no operational DHCP servers. This situation could occur very easily where one server fails and then the other crashes and reboots. If the rebooting server doesn't start processing DHCP client requests without first being in communication with the other server, then the level of DHCP redundancy is not particularly high. This is an appropriate approach if the possibility of partition is low, or if the safe period expiration time is well beyond the time at which an operator would notice and react to a partition situation. It is also quite appropriate if the safe period will never expire. Reasons to wait: If the current server has been down for longer than the maximum-client-lead-time, and it is partitioned from the other server, then when it returns it will attempt to use its own available addresses to allocate to new DHCP clients, and the other server may well be in PARTNER-DOWN state and may have already allocated some of those available addresses to DHCP clients. In cases where the possibility of partition is high, and the safe period expiration time is less than the likely operator reaction time, this is a good approach to use. 9.4. PARTNER-DOWN state PARTNER-DOWN state is a state either server can enter. When in this state, the server does not assume that the other server could still be operating and servicing a different set of clients, but instead assumes that it is the only server operating. If one server is in PARTNER-DOWN state, the other server MUST NOT be operating. 9.4.1. Upon entry to PARTNER-DOWN state No special actions are required when entering PARTNER-DOWN state. The server should continue to attempt to connect to the partner periodically. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 84] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 9.4.2. Operation while in PARTNER-DOWN state A server in PARTNER-DOWN state MUST respond to DHCP client requests. It will allow renewal of all outstanding leases on IP addresses, and will allocate IP addresses from its own pool, and after a fixed period of time (the MCLT interval) has elapsed from entry into PARTNER-DOWN state, it will allocate IP addresses from the set of all available IP addresses. Once a server has entered NORMAL state, the PARTNER-DOWN state is entered only on command of an external agency (typically an adminis- trator of some sort) or after the expiration of an externally config- ured minimum safe-time after the beginning of COMMUNICATIONS- INTERRUPTED state. Any available IP address tagged as available for allocation by the other server (at entry to PARTNER-DOWN state) MUST NOT be allocated to a new client until the maximum-client-lead-time beyond the entry into PARTNER-DOWN state has elapsed. A server in PARTNER-DOWN state MUST NOT allocate an IP address to a DHCP client different from that to which it was allocated at the entrance to PARTNER-DOWN state until the maximum-client-lead-time beyond the maximum of the following times: client expiration time, most recently transmitted potential-expiration-time, most recently received ack of potential-expiration-time from the partner, and most recently acked potential-expiration-time to the partner. See section 7.1.5 for details. If this time would be earlier than the current time plus the maximum-client-lead-time, then the time the server entered PARTNER-DOWN state plus the maximum-client-lead-time is used. Two options exist for lease times given out while in PARTNER-DOWN state, with different ramifications flowing from each. If the server wishes the Failover protocol to protect it from loss of stable storage in PARTNER-DOWN state, then it should ensure that the MCLT based lease time restrictions in Section 5.1 are maintained, even in PARTNER-DOWN state. If the server wishes to forego the protection of the Failover proto- col in the event of loss of stable storage, then it need recognize no restrictions on actual client lease times while in PARTNER-DOWN state. A server in PARTNER-DOWN state MUST continue to attempt to establish communications and synchronization with its partner. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 85] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 9.4.3. Transitions out of PARTNER-DOWN state When a server in PARTNER-DOWN state succeeds in establishing a con- nection to its partner, its actions are conditional on the state and flags received in the STATE message from the other server as part of the process of establishing the connection. If the STARTUP bit is set in the server-flags option of a received STATE message, a server in PARTNER-DOWN state MUST NOT take any state transitions based on reestablishing communications. Essentially, if a server is in PARTNER-DOWN state, it ignores all STATE messages from its partner that have the STARTUP bit set in the server-flags option of the STATE message. If the STARTUP bit is not set in the server-flags option of a STATE message received from its partner, then a server in PARTNER-DOWN state takes the following actions based on the value of the server- state option in the received STATE message: o partner in NORMAL, COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED, PARTNER-DOWN or POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state transition to POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state o partner in RECOVER state stay in PARTNER-DOWN state o partner in RECOVER-DONE state transition into NORMAL state 9.5. RECOVER state This state indicates that the server has no information in its stable storage or that it is re-integrating with a server in PARTNER-DOWN state after it has been down. A server in this state MUST attempt to refresh its stable storage from the other server. 9.5.1. Operation in RECOVER state A server in RECOVER MUST NOT respond to DHCP client requests. A server in RECOVER state will attempt to reestablish communications with the other server. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 86] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 9.5.2. Transitions out of RECOVER state If the other server is in POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state when communica- tions are reestablished, then the server in RECOVER state will move to POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state itself. If the other server is in RECOVER state, then this server SHOULD sig- nal an error and halt processing. If the other server is in any other state, then the server in RECOVER state will request an update of missing binding information by send- ing an UPDREQ message. If the server has been instructed (through configuration or other external agency) that it has lost its stable storage, or if it has deduced that from the fact that it has no record of ever having talked to its partner, while its partner does have a record of communicating with it, it MUST send an UPDREQALL message, otherwise it MUST send an UPDREQ message. It will wait for an UPDDONE message, and upon receipt of that message it will start a timer whose expiration is set to a time equal to the time the server went down (if known) or the current time (if the down-time is unknown) plus the maximum-client-lead-time. When this timer goes off, the server will transition into RECOVER-DONE state. This is to allow any IP addresses that were allocated by this server prior to loss of its client binding information in stable storage to contact the other server or to time out. See Figure 9.5.2-1. DISCUSSION: The actual requirement on this wait period in RECOVER is that it start not before the recovering server went down, not necessarily when it came back up. If the time when the recovering server failed is known, it could be communicated to the recovering server (perhaps through actions of the network administrator), and the wait period could be reduced to the maximum-client-lead-time less the difference between the current time and the time the server failed. In this way, the waiting period could be minimized. Various heuristics could be used to estimate this time, for exam- ple if the recovering server periodically updates stable storage with a time stamp, the wait period could be calculated to start at the time of the last update of stable storage plus the time required for the next update (which never occurred). This esti- mate is later than the server went down, but probably not too much later. If an UPDDONE message isn't received within an implementation Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 87] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 dependent amount of time, and no BNDUPD messages are being received, the connection SHOULD be dropped. A B Server Server | | RECOVER PARTNER-DOWN | | | >--UPDREQ--------------------> | | | | <---------------------BNDUPD--< | | >--BNDACK--------------------> | ... ... | | | <---------------------BNDUPD--< | | >--BNDACK--------------------> | | | | <--------------------UPDDONE--< | | | Wait MCLT from last known | time of operation | | | RECOVER-DONE | | | | >--STATE-(RECOVER-DONE)------> | | NORMAL | <-------------(NORMAL)-STATE--< | NORMAL | | >---- State-(NORMAL)---------------> | | | | Figure 9.5.2-1: Transition out of RECOVER state Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 88] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 9.6. NORMAL state NORMAL state is the state used by a server when it is communicating with the other server, and any required resynchronization has been performed. While some bindings database synchronization is performed in NORMAL state, potential conflicts are resolved prior to entry into NORMAL state as is binding database data loss. 9.6.1. Upon entry to NORMAL state When entering NORMAL state, a server will send to the other server all currently unacknowledged binding updates as BNDUPD messages. When the above process is complete, if the server entering NORMAL state is a secondary server, then it will request IP addresses for allocation using the POOLREQ message. 9.6.2. Processing DHCP client requests and load balancing In NORMAL state, a server MUST process every DHCPREQUEST/RENEWAL or DHCPREQUEST/REBINDING request it receives. And, it processes other requests only for those clients as dictated by the load balancing algorithm specified in [LOADB]. As discussed in section 5.3, each server will take the client- identifier from each DHCP client request (or the client-hardware- address, i.e., the htype concatenated to the front of the chaddr if no client-identifier is present in the request) and use it as the 'Request ID' specified in [LOADB]. After applying the algorithm specified in [LOADB] and comparing the result with the hash bucket assignment (performed during connect processing between failover servers), each failover server will be able to unambiguously deter- mine if it should process the DHCP client request. 9.6.3. Operation in NORMAL state When in NORMAL state, for every DHCP client request that it processes, as determined by the algorithm described in section 9.6.2, above, a server will operate in the following manner: o Lease time calculations As discussed in section 5.2.1, "Control of lease time", the lease interval given to a DHCP client can never be more than the MCLT greater than the most recently received potential- Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 89] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 expiration-time from the failover partner or the current time, whichever is later. As long as a server adheres to this constraint, the specifics of the lease interval that it gives to a DHCP client or the value of the potential-expiration-time sent to its failover partner are implementation dependent. One possible approach is dis- cussed in section 5.2.1, but that particular approach is in no way required by this protocol. See section 7.1.5 for details concerning the storage of time associated IP addresses and how to use these times when calcu- lating lease times for DHCP clients. o Lazy update of partner server After an ACK of a IP address binding, the server servicing a DHCP client request attempts to update its partner with the new binding information. The lease time used in the update of the secondary MUST be at least that given to the DHCP client in the DHCPACK, and the potential-expiration-time MUST be at least the lease time, and SHOULD be considerably longer. o Reallocation of IP addresses between clients Whenever a client binding is released or expires, a BNDUPD mes- sage must be sent to partner, setting the binding state to RELEASED or EXPIRED. However, until a BNDACK is received for this message, the IP address cannot be allocated to another client. It can be allocated to the same client again. In normal state, each server receives binding updates from its partner server in BNDUPD messages. It records these in its client binding database in stable storage and then sends a corresponding BNDACK message to the primary server. It MUST ensure that the infor- mation is recorded in stable storage prior to sending the BNDACK mes- sage back to its partner. 9.6.4. Transitions out of NORMAL state If an external command is received by a server in NORMAL state informing it that its partner is down, then transition into PARTNER- DOWN state. Generally, this would be an unusual situation, where some external agency knew the partner server was down. Using the command in this case would be appropriate if the polling interval and timeout were long. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 90] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 If a server in NORMAL state fails to receive acks to messages sent to its partner for an implementation dependent period of time, it MAY move into COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state. This situation might occur if the partner server was capable of maintaining the TCP con- nection between the server and also capable of sending a CONTACT mes- sage every tSend seconds, but was (for some reason) incapable of pro- cessing BNDUPD messages. If the communications is determined to not be "ok" (as defined in section 8), then transition into COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state. If a server in NORMAL state receives any messages from its partner where the partner has changed state from that expected by the server in NORMAL state, then the server should transition into COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state and take the appropriate state tran- sition from there. For example, it would be expected for the partner to transition from POTENTIAL-CONFLICT into NORMAL state, but not for the partner to transition from NORMAL into POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state. 9.7. COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED State A server goes into COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state whenever it is unable to communicate with the other server. Primary and secondary servers cycle automatically (without administrative intervention) between NORMAL and COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state as the network connection between them fails and recovers, or as the partner server cycles between operational and non-operational. No duplicate IP address allocation can occur while the servers cycle between these states. 9.7.1. Upon entry to COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state When a server enters COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state, if it has been configured to support an automatic transition out of COMMUNICATIONS- INTERRUPTED state and into PARTNER-DOWN state (i.e., a "safe period" has been configured, see section 10), then a timer MUST be started for the length of the configured safe period. A server transitioning into the COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state from the NORMAL state SHOULD raise some alarm condition to alert adminis- trative staff to a potential problem in the DHCP subsystem. 9.7.2. Operation in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED State In this state a server MUST respond to all DHCP client requests, and the algorithm for load balancing described in section 5.3 MUST NOT be Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 91] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 used. When allocating new IP addresses, each server allocates from its own IP address pool, where the primary MUST allocate only FREE IP addresses, and the secondary MUST allocate only BACKUP IP addresses. When responding to renewal requests, each server will allow continued renewal of a DHCP client's current lease on an IP address irrespec- tive of whether that lease was given out by the receiving server or not, although the renewal period MUST NOT exceed the maximum client lead time (MCLT) beyond the latest of: 1) the potential-expiration- time already acknowledged by the other server, or 2) the lease- expiration-time, or 3) the potential-expiration-time received from the partner server. However, since the server cannot communicate with its partner in this state, the acknowledged-potential-expiration time will not be updated in any new bindings. This is likely to eventually cause the actual- client-lease-times to be the current time plus the maximum-client- lead-time (unless this is greater than the desired-client-lease- time). 9.7.3. Transition out of COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED State If the safe period timer expires while a server is in the COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state, it will transition immediately into PARTNER-DOWN state. If an external command is received by a server in COMMUNICATIONS- INTERRUPTED state informing it that its partner is down, it will transition immediately into PARTNER-DOWN state. If communications is restored with the other server, then the server in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state will transition into another state based on the state of the partner: o partner in NORMAL or COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED The partner SHOULD NOT be in NORMAL state here, since upon res- toration of communications it MUST have created a new TCP con- nection which would have forced it into COMMUNICATIONS- INTERRUPTED state. Still, we should account for every state just in case. Transition into the NORMAL state. o partner in RECOVER Stay in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 92] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 o partner in RECOVER-DONE Transition into NORMAL state. o partner in PARTNER-DOWN or POTENTIAL-CONFLICT Transition into POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state. o partner in PAUSED Stay in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state. o partner in SHUTDOWN Transition into PARTNER-DOWN state. The following figure illustrates the transition from NORMAL to COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state and then back to NORMAL state again. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 93] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 Primary Secondary Server Server NORMAL NORMAL | >--CONTACT-------------------> | | <--------------------CONTACT--< | | [TCP connection broken] | COMMUNICATIONS : COMMUNICATIONS INTERRUPTED : INTERRUPTED | [attempt new TCP connection] | | [connection succeeds] | | | | >--CONNECT-------------------> | | <-----------------CONNECTACK--< | | <-------------------STATE-----< | | NORMAL | >--STATE---------------------> | NORMAL | | >--BNDUPD--------------------> | | <---------------------BNDACK--< | | | | <---------------------BNDUPD--< | | >------BNDACK----------------> | ... ... | | | <--------------------POOLREQ--< | | >--POOLRESP-(2)--------------> | | | | >--BNDUPD-(#1)---------------> | | <---------------------BNDACK--< | | | | <--------------------POOLREQ--< | | >--POOLRESP-(0)--------------> | | | | >--BNDUPD-(#2)---------------> | | <---------------------BNDACK--< | | | Figure 9.7.3-1: Transition from NORMAL to COMMUNICATIONS- INTERRUPTED and back (example with 2 addresses allocated to secondary) Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 94] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 9.8. POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state This state indicates that the two servers are attempting to re- integrate with each other, but at least one of them was running in a state that did not guarantee automatic reintegration would be possible. In POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state the servers may determine that the same IP address has been offered and accepted by two different DHCP clients. It is a goal of this protocol to minimize the possibility that POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state is ever entered. 9.8.1. Upon entry to POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state When a primary server enters POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state it should request that the secondary send it all updates of which it is currently unaware by sending an UPDREQ message to the secondary server. A secondary server entering POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state will wait for the primary to send it an UPDREQ message. 9.8.2. Any server in POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state MUST NOT process any incoming DHCP requests. 9.8.3. Transitions out of POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state If communications fails with the partner while in POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state, then the server will transition to RESOLUTION-INTERRUPTED state. Whenever either server receives an UPDDONE message from its partner while in POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state, it MUST transition to NORMAL state. This will cause the primary server to leave POTENTIAL- CONFLICT state prior to the secondary, since the primary sends an UPDREQ message and receives an UPDDONE before the secondary sends an UPDREQ message and receives its UPDDONE message. When a secondary server receives an indication that the primary server has transitioned from POTENTIAL-CONFLICT to NORMAL state, it SHOULD send an UPDREQ message to the primary server. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 95] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 Primary Secondary Server Server | | POTENTIAL-CONFLICT POTENTIAL-CONFLICT | | | >--UPDREQ--------------------> | | | | <---------------------BNDUPD--< | | >--BNDACK--------------------> | ... ... | | | <---------------------BNDUPD--< | | >--BNDACK--------------------> | | | | <--------------------UPDDONE--< | NORMAL | | >--STATE--(NORMAL)-----------> | | <---------------------UPDREQ--< | | | | >--BNDUPD--------------------> | | <---------------------BNDACK--< | ... ... | >--BNDUPD--------------------> | | <---------------------BNDACK--< | | | | >--UPDDONE-------------------> | | NORMAL | | | <--------------------POOLREQ--< | | >------POOLRESP-(n)----------> | | addresses | Figure 9.8.3-1: Transition out of POTENTIAL-CONFLICT 9.9. RESOLUTION-INTERRUPTED state This state indicates that the two servers were attempting to re- integrate with each other in POTENTIAL-CONFLICT state, but communications failed prior to completion of re-integration. If the servers remained in POTENTIAL-CONFLICT while communications was interrupted, neither server would be responsive to DHCP client requests, and if one server had crashed, then there might be no server able to process DHCP requests. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 96] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 9.9.1. Upon entry to RESOLUTION-INTERRUPTED state When a server enters RESOLUTION-INTERRUPTED state it SHOULD raise an alarm condition to alert administrative staff of a problem in the DHCP subsystem. 9.9.2. Operation in RESOLUTION-INTERRUPTED state In this state a server MUST respond to all DHCP client requests, and any load balancing (described in section 5.3) MUST NOT be used. When allocating new IP addresses, each server SHOULD allocate from its own IP address pool (if that can be determined), where the primary SHOULD allocate only FREE IP addresses, and the secondary SHOULD allocate only BACKUP IP addresses. When responding to renewal requests, each server will allow continued renewal of a DHCP client's current lease on an IP address irrespective of whether that lease was given out by the receiving server or not, although the renewal period MUST not exceed the maximum client lead time (MCLT) beyond the latest of: 1) the potential-expiration-time already acknowledged by the other server or 2) the lease-expiration-time or 3) `potential-expiration- time received from the partner server. However, since the server cannot communicate with its partner in this state, the acknowledged-potential-expiration time will not be updated in any new bindings. 9.9.3. Transitions out of RESOLUTION-INTERRUPTED state If an external command is received by a server in RESOLUTION- INTERRUPTED state informing it that its partner is down, it will transition immediately into PARTNER-DOWN state. If communications is restored with the other server, then the server in RESOLUTION-INTERRUPTED state will transition into POTENTIAL- CONFLICT state. 9.10. RECOVER-DONE state This state exists to allow an interlocked transition for one server from RECOVER state and another server from PARTNER-DOWN or COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state into NORMAL state. 9.10.1. Operation in RECOVER-DONE state A server in RECOVER-DONE state MUST respond only to DHCPREQUEST/RENEWAL and DHCPREQUEST/REBINDING DHCP messages. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 97] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 9.10.2. Transitions out of RECOVER-DONE state When a server in RECOVER-DONE state determines that its partner server has entered NORMAL state, then it will transition into NORMAL state as well. If communications fails while in RECOVER-DONE state, a server will stay in RECOVER-DONE state. 9.11. PAUSED state This state exists to allow one server to inform another that it will be out of service for what is predicted to be a relatively short time, and to allow the other server to transition to COMMUNICATIONS- INTERRUPTED state immediately and to begin servicing all DHCP clients with no interruption in service to new DHCP clients. A server which is aware that it is shutting down temporarily SHOULD send a STATE message with the server-state option containing PAUSED state and close the TCP connection. While a server may or may not transition internally into PAUSED state, the 'previous' state determined when it is restarted MUST be the state the server was in prior to receiving the command to shut- down and restart and which precedes its entry into the PAUSED state. See section 9.3.2 concerning the use of the previous state upon server restart. 9.11.1. Upon entry to PAUSED state When entering PAUSED state, the server MUST store the previous state in stable storage, and use that state as the previous state when it is restarted. 9.11.2. Transitions out of PAUSED state A server transitions out of PAUSED state by being restarted. At that time, the previous state MUST be the state the server was in prior to entering the PAUSED state. 9.12. SHUTDOWN state This state exists to allow one server to inform another that it will be out of service for what is predicted to be a relatively long time, and to allow the other server to transition immediately to PARTNER- DOWN state, and take over completely for the server going down. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 98] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 A server which is aware that it is shutting down SHOULD send a STATE message with the server-state field containing SHUTDOWN. While a server may or may not transition internally into SHUTDOWN state, the 'previous' state determined when it is restarted MUST be the state active prior to the command to shutdown. See section 9.3.2 concerning the use of the previous state upon server restart. 9.12.1. Upon entry to SHUTDOWN state When entering SHUTDOWN state, the server MUST record the previous state in stable storage for use when the server is restarted. It also MUST record the current time as the last time operational. A server which is aware that it is shutting down SHOULD send a STATE message with the server-state field containing SHUTDOWN. 9.12.2. Operation in SHUTDOWN state A server in SHUTDOWN state MUST NOT respond to any DHCP client input. If a server receives any message indicating that the partner has moved to PARTNER-DOWN state while it is in SHUTDOWN state then it MUST record RECOVER state as the previous state to be used when it is restarted. A server SHOULD wait for a few seconds after informing the partner of entry into SHUTDOWN state (if communications are okay) to determine if the partner entered PARTNER-DOWN state. 9.12.3. Transitions out of SHUTDOWN state A server transitions out of SHUTDOWN state by being restarted. 10. Safe Period Due to the restrictions imposed on each server while in COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state, long-term operation in this state is not feasible for either server. One reason that these states exist at all, is to allow the servers to easily survive transient network communications failures of a few minutes to a few days (although the actual time periods will depend a great deal on the DHCP activity of the network in terms of arrival and departure of DHCP clients on the network). Eventually, when the servers are unable to communicate, they will have to move into a state where they no longer can re-integrate Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 99] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 without some possibility of a duplicate IP address allocation. There are two ways that they can move into this state (known as PARTNER- DOWN). They can either be informed by external command that, indeed, the partner server is down. In this case, there is no difficulty in mov- ing into the PARTNER-DOWN state since it is an accurate reflection of reality and the protocol has been designed to operate correctly (even during reintegration) as long as, when in PARTNER-DOWN state the partner is, indeed, down. The more difficult scenario is when the servers are running unat- tended for extended periods, and in this case an option is provided to configure something called a "safe-period" into each server. This OPTIONAL safe-period is the period after which either the primary or secondary server will automatically transition to PARTNER-DOWN from COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state. If this transition is completed and the partner is not down, then the possibility of duplicate IP address allocations will exist. The goal of the "safe-period" is to allow network operations staff some time to react to a server moving into COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED state. During the safe-period the only requirement is that the net- work operations staff determine if both servers are still running -- and if they are, to either fix the network communications failure between them, or to take one of the servers down before the expira- tion of the safe-period. The length of the safe-period is installation dependent, and depends in large part on the number of unallocated IP addresses within the subnet address pool and the expected frequency of arrival of previ- ously unknown DHCP clients requiring IP addresses. Many environments should be able to support safe-periods of several days. During this safe period, either server will allow renewals from any existing client. The only limitation concerns the need for IP addresses for the DHCP server to hand out to new DHCP clients and the need to re-allocate IP addresses to different DHCP clients. The number of "extra" IP addresses required is equal to the expected total number of new DHCP clients encountered during the safe period. This is dependent only on the arrival rate of new DHCP clients, not the total number of outstanding leases on IP addresses. In the unlikely event that a relatively short safe period of an hour is all that can be used (given a dearth of IP addresses or a very high arrival rate of new DHCP clients), even that can provide sub- stantial benefits in allowing the DHCP subsystem to ride through Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 100] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 minor problems that could occur and be fixed within that hour. In these cases, no possibility of duplicate IP address allocation exists, and re-integration after the failure is solved will be automatic and require no operator intervention. 11. Security The Failover protocol communicates DHCP lease activity and this data is generally easily discovered via other means, such as by pinging addresses and doing DNS lookups. Therefore, the need to encrypt the data over the wire is likely not great (though some sites may feel differently). However, it is very desirable to assure the integrity of failover partners and to thus ensure proper operation of the servers. For example, denial of service attacks are possible by the communication of invalid state information to one or both servers. Therefore, the Failover protocol MUST be capable of being secured by using a simple shared secret message digest which covers each mes- sage. This provides authentication of the servers, but does not pro- vide encryption of the data exchange. The Failover protocol MAY also be secured by using TLS [RFC 2246] (Transport Layer Security) if encryption of the data exchange is desired. The use of the shared secret or TLS will not protect against TCP or IP layer attacks (such as someone sending fake TCP RST segments). IPsec SHOULD be used to protect against most (if not all) of these kinds of attacks. 11.1. Simple shared secret Messages between the failover partners are authenticated through the use of a shared secret, which is never sent over the network and must be known by each server. How each server is told about this shared secret and secures its storage of the shared secret is outside the scope of this document. If a server is configured with a shared secret for a partner, it MUST send the message-digest option in ALL messages to that partner and it MUST treat any messages received from that partner without a message-digest option as failing authentica- tion. If a server is not configured with a shared secret for a partner, it MUST NOT send the message-digest option in any message to that partner and it MUST treat any messages received from that partner with a message-digest option as failing authentication. The shared secret is used to calculate a 16 octet message-digest Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 101] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 which is sent in every failover message as the message-digest option. See section 12.16. The message-digest contains a one-way 16 octet MD5 [RFC 1321] hash calculated over a stream of octets consisting of the entire message concatenated with the shared secret. For calculation, the message includes the message-digest option with the message-digest data zeroed (16-octets of zero). Once the calcula- tion is complete, these 16 octets of zero are replaced by the 16- octet MD5 hash and the message is sent. For verification, the 16-octet message-digest is saved and replaced with 16-octets of zero and calculated per above. The resulting MD5 hash is compared to the received hash and if they match, the message is assumed authenticated. A failover partner that fails to authenticate a received message or receives a message without a message-digest option when configured with a shared secret MUST close the connection immediately and take steps to notify operators. This use of the shared secret is very similar to that used for RADIUS Accounting [RFC 2139]. 11.2. TLS TLS, Transport Layer Security, as specified in [RFC 2246] MAY be used. The use of TLS would be similar to the way it is used with SMTP [RFC 2487] and IMAP/POP3/ACAP [RFC 2595]. To request the use of TLS, the server that successfully opened a con- nection to its peer MUST send the TLS option as part of the CONNECT message. The server receiving the TLS option MUST respond with a TLS-reply option indicating its acceptance or rejection of the TLS- request in the CONNECT message. If the CONNECTACK message contained a TLS-reply of 1 , then both servers begin TLS negotiation. Upon completion of this negotiation, the server which originally sent the CONNECT message MUST resend its CONNECT message without any TLS- request, and must wait for a corresponding CONNECTACK. Implementation of the TLS_DHE_DSS_WITH_3DES_EDE_CBC_SHA [RFC 2246] cipher suite is REQUIRED in Failover servers supporting TLS. This is important as it assures that any two compliant implementations can be configured to interoperate. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 102] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12. Failover Options This section lists all of the options that are currently defined to be used with the failover protocol. See section 6.2 for details con- cerning time values. 12.1. addresses-transferred A 32 bit unsigned long in network byte order. Reports the number of addresses transferred by the primary to the secondary server (addresses to be used for the secondary server's private address pool). Code Len Number of Addresses +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 1 | 0 | 4 | n1 | n2 | n3 | n4 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ 12.2. assigned-IP-address The DHCP managed IP address to which this message refers. Code Len Address +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 2 | 0 | 4 | a1 | a2 | a3 | a4 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 103] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.3. binding-status This option is used to convey the current state of a binding. Code Len Type +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 1-7 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ Legal values for this option are: Value Binding Status ----- ------------------------------------------------ 1 FREE Lease is currently available 2 ACTIVE Lease is assigned to a client 3 EXPIRED Lease has expired 4 RELEASED Lease has been released by client 5 ABANDONED A server, or client flagged address as unusable 6 RESET Lease was freed by some external agent 7 BACKUP Lease belongs to secondary's private address pool 8 BACKUP-RESERVED Lease belongs to secondary's private address pool as well as primary's since it is reserved on primary. 12.4. client-identifier This is the client-identifier for the client associated with a binding. The client-identifier data is subject to the same conventions as DHCP option 81 [RFC 2132]. Code Len Client Identifier +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+--- | 0 | 4 | 0 | n | i1 | i2 | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-- Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 104] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.5. client-hardware-address This is the hardware address for the client associated with a binding. Byte t1 (type) MUST be set to the proper ARP hardware address code, as defined in the ARP section of RFC 1700 (it MUST NOT be zero!) Code Len htype chaddr +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+--- | 0 | 5 | 0 | n | t1 | c1 | c2 | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+--- 12.6. client-last-transaction-time The time at which this server last received a DHCP request from a particular client expressed as an absolute time (see section 6.2). Code Len client last transaction time +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 6 | 0 | 4 | t1 | t2 | t3 | t4 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ 12.7. client-reply-options This option contains options from a DHCP server's reply to a DHCP client request. It is sent in a BNDUPD message. The first 4 bytes of the option contain the "magic number" of the option area from which the DHCP reply options were taken and serves to define the format of the rest of the sub-options contained in this option. After the magic number, the options included are in the normal options format appropriate for that magic number. A server SHOULD NOT include all of the options in a DHCP server's reply to a client's request in this option, but rather a server SHOULD include only those options which are of likely interest to its partner server. See section 7.1 for details. Code Len Magic Number Embedded options +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-- | 0 | 7 | 0 | n | m1 | m2 | m3 | m4 | b1 | b2 | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-- Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 105] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.8. client-request-options This option contains options from a DHCP client's request. It is sent in a BNDUPD message. The first 4 bytes of the option contain the "magic number" of the option area from which the DHCP client's request options were taken and serves to define the format of the rest of the sub-options contained in this option. After the magic number, the options included are in the normal options format appropriate for that magic number. A server SHOULD NOT include all of the options in a DHCP client request in this option, but rather a server SHOULD include only those options which are of likely interest to its partner server. See section 7.1 for details. Code Len Magic Number Embedded options +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-- | 0 | 8 | 0 | n | m1 | m2 | m3 | m4 | b1 | b2 | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+----+----+----+----+----+-- Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 106] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.9. DDNS If an implementation supports Dynamic DNS updates, this option is used to communicate the status of the DDNS update associated with a particular lease binding. The Flags field conveys the types of DNS RRs that are to be updated by the DHCP server, and the status of the DDNS update. The Domain Name field conveys the DNS FQDN that the DHCP server is using to refer to the client, in DNS encoding as specified in [RFC 1035]. Code Len Flags Domain Name +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----+------ | 0 | 9 | 0 | n | flags | d1 | d2 | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+------+------+-----+------ The Flags field is a 16-bit field; several bit positions are specified here. 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ |C|A|D|P| MBZ | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ The bits (numbered from the least-significant bit in network byte-order) are used as follows: 0 (C): A RR update successfully completed 1 (A): Server is controlling A RR on behalf of the client 2 (D): PTR RR update successfully completed (Done) 3 (P): Server is controlling PTR RR on behalf of the client 4-15 : Must be zero All of the unspecified bit positions SHOULD be set to 0 by servers sending the Failover-DDNS option, and they MUST be ignored by servers receiving the option. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 107] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.10. delayed-service-parameter The delayed-service-parameter is an optional load balancing tuning parameter, defined in [LOADB]. If it is used, it MUST be sent in the same message as the hash-bucket-assignment option (see section 12.11). Format : Code Len Seconds +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+ | 0 | 10 | 0 | 1 | S | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+ S is a one byte value, 1..255. 12.11. hash-bucket-assignment A set of load balancing hash values for the secondary server. See section 5.3 for more information on how this option is used. The format and usage of the data in this option is defined in [LOADB]. Code Len Hash Buckets +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 11 | 0 | 32 | b1 | b2 | ... | b32 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 12.12. lease-expiration-time The lease expiration time is the lease interval that a DHCP server has ACKed to a DHCP client added to the time at which that ACK was transmitted -- expressed as an absolute time (see section 6.2). Code Len Time +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 12 | 0 | 4 | t1 | t2 | t3 | t4 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 108] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.13. max-unacked-bndupd The maximum number of BNDUPD message that this server is prepared to accept over the TCP connection without causing the TCP connection to block. A 32 bit unsigned integer value, in network byte order. Code Len Maximum Unacked BNDUPD +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 13 | 0 | 4 | n1 | n2 | n3 | n4 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ 12.14. MCLT Maximum Client Lead Time, an interval, in seconds. A 32 bit unsigned integer value, in network byte order. Code Len Time +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 14 | 0 | 4 | t1 | t2 | t3 | t4 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ 12.15. message This option is used to supply a human readable message text. It may be used in association with the Reject Reason Code to provide a human readable error message for the reject. Code Len Text +-----+-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-- | 0 | 15 | 0 | n | c1 | c2 | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+------+-----+-- Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 109] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.16. message-digest The message digest for this message. This option consists of a variable number of bytes which contain the message digest of the message prior to the inclusion of this option. When this option appears in a message, it MUST appear as the last option in the message. It MUST appear in every message if message digests are required. Code Len Message Digest +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+----- | 0 | 16 | 0 | n | d1 | d2 | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+----- 12.17. potential-expiration-time The potential expiration time is the time that one server tells another server that it may wish to grant in a lease to a DHCP client. It is an absolute time. See section 6.2. Code Len Time +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 17 | 0 | 4 | t1 | t2 | t3 | t4 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ 12.18. receive-timer The number of seconds (an interval) within which the server must receive a message from its partner, or it will assume that communications with the partner is not ok. An unsigned 32 bit integer in network byte order. Code Len Receive Timer +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 18 | 0 | 4 | s1 | s2 | s3 | s4 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 110] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.19. protocol-version The protocol version being used by the server. It is only sent in the CONNECT and CONNECTACK messages. The current value for the version is 1. Code Len Version +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 19 | 0 | 1 | 1 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 111] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.20. reject-reason This option is used to selectively reject binding updates. It MAY be used in a BNDACK message or a CONNECTACK message, always associated with an assigned-IP-address option, which contains the IP address of the update being rejected. Code Len Reason Code +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 20 | 0 | 1 | R1 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ Reason codes : 0 Reserved 1 Illegal IP address (not part of any address pool). 2 Fatal conflict exists: address in use by other client. 3 Missing binding information. 4 Connection rejected, time mismatch too great. 5 Connection rejected, invalid MCLT. 6 Connection rejected, unknown reason. 7 Connection rejected, duplicate connection. 8 Connection rejected, invalid failover partner. 9 TLS not supported. 10 TLS supported but not configured. 11 TLS required but not supported by partner. 12 Message digest not supported. 13 Message digest not configured. 14 Protocol version mismatch. 15 Outdated binding information. 16 Less critical binding information. 17 No traffic within sufficient time. 18 Hash bucket assignment conflict. 19-253, reserved. 254 Unknown: Error occurred but does not match any reason code. 255 Reserved for code expansion. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 112] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.21. sending-server-IP-address The IP address of the server sending this message. This option is required for all messages if the message digest option used. Code Len Address +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 21 | 0 | 4 | a1 | a2 | a3 | a4 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ 12.22. server-flags This option is used to convey the current flags of the failover endpoint in the sending server. Code Len Server Flags +-----+-----+-----+-----+-------+ | 0 | 22 | 0 | 1 | flags | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-------+ The flags field is an 8-bit field; one bit position is specified here. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ |S| MBZ | +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ The bits (numbered from the least-significant bit in network byte-order) are used as follows: 0 (S): STARTUP, Bit 0 MUST be set to 1 whenever the server is in STARTUP state, and set to 0 otherwise. (Note that when in STARTUP state, the state transmitted in the server-state option is usually the last recorded state from stable storage, but see section 9.3 for details.) 1-7 : Must be zero Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 113] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.23. server-state This option is used to convey the current state of the failover endpoint in the sending server. Code Len Server State +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 23 | 0 | 1 | 1-9 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ Legal values for this option are: Value Server State ----- ------------------------------------------------------------- 0 reserved 1 STARTUP Startup state (1) 2 NORMAL Normal state 3 COMMUNICATIONS-INTERRUPTED Communication interrupted (safe) 4 PARTNER-DOWN Partner down (unsafe mode) 5 POTENTIAL-CONFLICT Synchronizing 6 RECOVER Recovering bindings from partner 7 PAUSED Shutting down for a short period. 8 SHUTDOWN Shutting down for an extended period. 9 RECOVER-DONE Interlock state prior to NORMAL 10 RESOLUTION-INTERRUPTED Comm. failed during resolution (1) The STARTUP state is never sent to the partner server, it is indicated by the STARTUP bit in the server-flags options (see section 12.22). 12.24. start-time-of-state This option is used for different states in different messages. In a BNDUPD message it represents the start time of the state of the lease in the BNDUPD message. In a STATE message, it represents the start time of the partner server's failover state. In all cases it is an absolute time. Code Len Start Time of State +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 24 | 0 | 4 | t1 | t2 | t3 | t4 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+-----+-----+ Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 114] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.25. TLS-reply This option contains information relating to TLS security negotiation. It is sent in a CONNECTACK message A t1 value of 0 indicates no TLS operation, a value of 1 indicates that TLS operation is required. Code Len TLS +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 25 | 0 | 1 | t1 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 12.26. TLS-request This option contains information relating to TLS security negotiation. It is sent in a CONNECT message. The t1 byte is the TLS request from this server. A value of 0 indicates no TLS operation (to communicate the other server MUST NOT require TLS), a value of 1 indicates that TLS operation is desired but not required (to communicate, the other server MAY utilize TLS), and a value of 2 indicates that TLS operation is required (to communicate the other server MUST utilize TLS) to establish communications with this server. Code Len TLS +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ | 0 | 26 | 0 | 1 | t1 | +-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 12.27. vendor-class-identifier A string which identifies the vendor of the failover protocol implementation. Code Len vendor class string +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+--- | 0 | 27 | 0 | n | c1 | c2 | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+--- Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 115] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 12.28. vendor-specific-options This option is used to convey options specific to a particular vendor's implementation. The vendor class identifier is used to specify which option space the embedded options are drawn from. It functions similarly to the vendor class identifier and vendor specific options in the DHCP protocol. This option contains other options in the same two byte code, two byte length format. If this option appears in a message without a corresponding vendor class identifier, it MUST be ignored. Code Len Embedded options +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+--- | 0 | 28 | 0 | n | c1 | c2 | ... +-----+-----+-----+-----+----+-----+--- 13. IANA Considerations This document defines several number spaces (failover options, fail- over message types, and failover reject reason codes). For all of these number spaces, certain values are defined in this specifica- tion. New values may only be defined by IETF Consensus, as described in [RFC 2434]. Basically, this means that they are defined by RFCs approved by the IESG. 14. Acknowledgments Ralph Droms started it all, by sketching out an initial interserver draft that embodied ideas from several past IETF meetings. In that draft, he acknowledged contributions by Jeff Mogul, Greg Minshall, Rob Stevens, Walt Wimer, Ted Lemon, and the DHC working group. Kim Kinnear and Bob Cole each extended that draft, separately and then together, until they created an interserver draft that supported any number of servers. The complexity of that approach was just too great, and that draft wasn't greeted with enthusiasm by many, includ- ing its authors. It did however lead to a much simpler approach embodied in the first Failover draft by Greg Rabil, Mike Dooley, Arun Kapur and Ralph Droms. This draft posited only two servers -- a primary and a Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 116] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 secondary. Kim Kinnear then wrote the Safe Failover draft to layer on top of the Failover Draft and increase its robustness in the face of certain rare network failures. At the spring 1998 IETF meeting in LA, the DHC working group said that they wanted a merged Failover and Safe Failover draft. Steve Gonczi and Bernie Volz stepped up and produced the raw material for such a merged draft, along with a new message format designed around DHCP options and other extensions and clarifications. Kim Kinnear edited their work into draft format and made other changes in time for the Summer Chicago IETF meeting. During the summer and fall of 1998, two groups worked on separate implementations of the UDP failover draft. Bernie Volz and Steve Gonczi constituted one group, and Kim Kinnear, Mark Stapp and Paul Fox made up the other. These two groups worked together to produce considerable changes and simplifications of the protocol during that period, and Steve Gonczi and Kim Kinnear edited those changes into -03 draft in time for submission to the December 1998 Orlando IETF meeting. In February of 1999 Kim Kinnear and Mark Stapp hosted a meeting on people interested in the failover draft. During that meeting a gen- eral agreement was reached to recast the failover protocol to use TCP instead of UDP. In addition, the group together brainstormed a work- able load-balancing technique. Kim Kinnear rewrote the entire draft to include the changes made at that meeting as well as to restructure the draft along guidelines suggested by Thomas Narten. The result was the -04 draft, submitted prior to the Oslo IETF meeting. The initial idea for a hash-based load balancing approach was offered by Ted Lemon, and the determination of an algorithm and its integra- tion into the draft was done by Steve Gonczi. The security section was spearheaded by Bernie Volz. Both contributed considerably to the ideas and text in the rest of the draft with several reviews. In early October of 1999, three conference calls were held to discuss the -04 draft. The -05 includes changes as a result of those calls, perhaps the largest of which was to remove the load balancing approach into a separate draft. Thanks to all of the many people who participated in the conference calls. Changes were made because of contributions by: Ted Lemon, David Erdmann, Richard Jones, Rob Stevens, Thomas Narten, Diana Lane, and Andre Kostur. Another conference call was held in mid-January of 2000, and the -06 draft was produced to tighten up the the -05 draft both technically Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 117] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 as well as editorially. This, the -07 draft was edited by Kim Kinnear and was based in part on reviews by Richard Jones, Bernie Volz, and Steve Gonczi. It embo- dies several technical updates as well as numerous editorial revi- sions that enhance both correctness as well as clarity. These most recent changes have not been widely circulated among the other authors prior to submission to the IETF. Many people have reviewed the various earlier drafts that went into this result. At American Internet, ideas were contributed by Brad Parker. At Cisco Systems Paul Fox and Ellen Garvey contributed to the design of the protocol. Glenn Waters of Nortel Networks contributed ideas and enthusiasm to make a Failover protocol that was both "safe" and "lazy". 15. References [AGENTINFO] Patrick, M., "draft-ietf-dhc-agent-options-11.txt", July, 2000. [DDNS] Rekhter, Y., Stapp, M., "draft-ietf-dhc-dhcp-dns-12.txt", March, 2000. [LOADB] Volz, B., Gonczi, S., Lemon, T., Stevens, R., "draft-ietf- dhc-loadb-02.txt", July, 1999. [RFC 1035] Mockapetris, P., "Domain Names - Implementation and Specification", November, 1987. [RFC 1321] Rivest, R., and Dusse, S., "The MD5 Message-Digest Algo- rithm", RFC 1321, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, RSA Data Security Inc., April 1992. [RFC 1534] Droms, R., "Interoperation between DHCP and BOOTP", RFC 1534, October 1993. [RFC 2119] Bradner, S. "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels", RFC 2119. [RFC 2131] Droms, R., "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol", RFC 2131, March 1997. [RFC 2132] Alexander, S., Droms, R., "DHCP Options and BOOTP Vendor Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 118] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 Extensions", Internet RFC 2132, March 1997. [RFC 2136] P. Vixie, S. Thomson, Y. Rekhter, J. Bound, "Dynamic Updates in the Domain Name System (DNS UPDATE)", RFC 2136, April 1997 [RFC 2139] Rigney, C., "Radius Accounting", RFC 2139, Livingston Enterprises, April 1997. [RFC 2246] Dierks, T., "The TLS Protocol, Version 1.0", RFC 2246, January 1999. [RFC 2434] Alvestrand, H. and T. Narten, "Guidelines for Writing an IANA Considerations Section in RFCs", BCP 26, RFC 2434, October 1998. [RFC 2487] Hoffman, P., "SMTP Service Extension for Secure SMTP over TLS", RFC 2487, January 1999. [RFC 2595] Newman, C., "Using TLS with IMAP, POP3, and ACAP", RFC 2595, June 1999. [USERCLASS] Droms, R., Demirtjis A., Stump, G., Gu, Y., Vyaghrapuri, R., Beser, B., Privat, J. "draft-ietf-dhc-userclass-08.txt", July, 2000. 16. Author's information Ralph Droms 323 Dana Engineering Bucknell University Lewisburg, PA 17837 Phone: (717) 524-1145 EMail: droms@bucknell.edu Kim Kinnear Mark Stapp Cisco Systems 250 Apollo Drive Chelmsford, MA 01824 Phone: (978) 244-8000 EMail: kkinnear@cisco.com mjs@cisco.com Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 119] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 Bernie Volz IPWorks, Inc. 959 Concord St. Framingham, MA 01701 Phone: (508) 879-1809 EMail: volz@ipworks.com Steve Gonczi Network Engines, Inc. 25 Dan Road Canton, MA 02021-2817 Phone: (781) 332-1165 Email: steve.gonczi@networkengines.com Greg Rabil, Mike Dooley, Arun Kapur Lucent Technologies 400 Lapp Road Malvern, PA 19355 Phone: (800) 208-2747 EMail: grabil@lucent.com mdooley@lucent.com akapur@lucent.com 17. Full Copyright Statement Copyright (C) The Internet Society (1999). All Rights Reserved. This document and translations of it may be copied and furnished to oth- ers, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it or assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and dis- tributed, in whole or in part, without restriction of any kind, provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are included on all such copies and derivative works. However, this document itself may not be modified in any way, such as by removing the copyright notice or references to the Internet Society or other Internet organizations, except as needed for the purpose of developing Internet standards in which case the procedures for copyrights defined in the Internet Stan- dards process must be followed, or as required to translate it into Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 120] Internet Draft DHCP Failover Protocol July 2000 languages other than English. The limited permissions granted above are perpetual and will not be revoked by the Internet Society or its successors or assigns. This document and the information contained herein is provided on an "AS IS" basis and THE INTERNET SOCIETY AND THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY WARRANTY THAT THE USE OF THE INFORMATION HEREIN WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY RIGHTS OR ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FIT- NESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Open Issues These issues need to be resolved: 1. Get another port number for connections. 2. Resolve how to handle secondary IP address allocation. 3. Figure out a better way to identify vendors. How about an SNMP Enterprise MIB value? 4. Need to tie reject-reasons to text of draft, remove obsolete reject-reasons. Droms, et. al. Expires January 2001 [Page 121]