DHCP pool overrides manual host assignment

Hello *,

I'm stuck with the DHCP configuration of my Netgear M4100 (firmware 10.0.2.20). My situation is, I have a VLAN 10.26.4.0/24 which has a DHCP pool within that subnet. However, there is one host which should always be 10.26.4.4, so I made a second pool for this single reservation.

Weird thing here is: On boot, the host in 100 % of my attempts receives an IP out of the dynamic pool instead of the manual reservation. When I release the DHCP lease after boot and do a "dhclient" to obtain a new address, it correctly assigns the manual IP address. Even worse, in the binding overview from the switch, it lists both assignments to the same MAC address. How is that even possible? Obviously it respects the reservation, but only after the dynamic pool's turn.

I was not able to trace down the behaviour to its roots so far. What i want is that while keeping the dynamic pool, I want the host to always obtain the same IP address. Can you advise what goes wrong here?

(M4100-26G) #show ip dhcp pool configuration all 

Pool: VLAN4_host_pi
Pool Type...................................... Manual
Client Name.................................... pi
Hardware Address............................... b8:27:eb:**:**:**
Hardware Address Type.......................... ethernet
Host........................................... 10.26.4.4 255.255.255.0
Lease Time..................................... 1 days 0 hrs 0 mins
DNS Servers.................................... 85.214.20.141
                                                213.73.91.35
                                                204.152.184.76
                                                194.150.168.168
Default Routers................................ 10.26.4.1
Netbios Node Type.............................. b-node

Pool: VLAN4_pool
Pool Type...................................... Dynamic
Network........................................ 10.26.4.0 255.255.255.0
Pool Size...................................... 253
Lease Time..................................... 1 days 0 hrs 0 mins
DNS Servers.................................... 85.214.20.141
                                                213.73.91.35
                                                204.152.184.76
                                                194.150.168.168
Default Routers................................ 10.26.4.1
Netbios Node Type.............................. b-node

Also, bonus question, I noticed that when I make an exclude for 10.26.4.4, it does not assign the IP regardless of the reservation. From my understanding, I have to exclude reservated IPs from pools, or does the switch automatically skip IPs that would compete with another pool?

Thank you so much.