Hi I am a bit confused, I want to setup failover within dhcpd. There are multiple subnets and hosts with static IP's. however it seems I need to set up an IP range for the subnets for failover to work is this correct or am I missing something
Depends on your distribution. What is it?
You'll want to disable zero-conf by feeding dhcpcd the -L option. Otherwise, it will assign a useless 169.x.y.z address instead of failing over. I fondly remember the day that patch went in, all my failovers stopped working and got zeroconf addresses, had to make a 200km round-trip to fix three servers 