pfsense static/dhcp what am I doing wrong?

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rscole86

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#318454 19-Jan-2025 11:03

I am trying to repurpose my RPI4 from a pihole to Home Assistant, no matter what I do, pfsense is assigning the RPI4 the static pihole address instead of the new Home Assistant address. It appears pfsense has cached a static address for the pihole that I cannot find.

I have; changed hostnames, changed static addresses, deleted DHCP cache, deleted all related static IP address and cleared ARP cache.

pfsense is still assigning the RPI4 the (now deleted) IPv4 address and hostname.

Any ideas what I am doing wrong, or where this information is hiding in my pfsense?

fe31nz

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#3333914 20-Jan-2025 23:12

DHCP clients will also request the previously assigned address, and some routers will oblige them even when they have had the router configuration changed to assign a static address. My EdgeRouters used to do that. So to assign a static DHCP address I had to do the router settings update with the client turned off, and only power up the client after the router change had been done and the router rebooted to clear its caches. Then finally that behaviour changed with one firmware update, so it now works as expected and assigning a static DHCP address will cause the router to ignore the client's requested address and also clear its own caching of the old address.

You can see the DHCP packets if you run Wireshark, tshark or tcpdump on the pfsense box, and that should tell you where the address is coming from.

http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_DHCPMessageFormat.htm