dhcpd mystery

[Timothy Murphy]

Who or what decides the length of a dhcp lease?
I notice that the computers accessing my desktop dhcpd server
have widely different lease times.
The laptop I'm currently using, for example,
has a lease time of about half-an-hour
according to /var/lib/dhclient/dhclient-eth1.leases:
-----------------------------
  renew 2 2008/1/29 13:08:12;
  rebind 2 2008/1/29 13:34:10;
  expire 2 2008/1/29 13:41:40;
-----------------------------

But the server sets the time much longer,
according to /etc/dhcpd.conf on my desktop:
-----------------------------
        default-lease-time 21600;
        max-lease-time 43200;
-----------------------------

Can the client change the lease times?
Or is it entirely up to the server?

[My grand-daughter's Wii seems to have an even shorter lease time,
at least it exchanges DHCPREQUEST/DHCPACK with the server every 2 minutes.]

Is there an online document that will instruct me on this?


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland