Starlink DHCP Route Injection dropping if DHCP expires briefly

M.Vietorisz — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:10:57 GMT

This is a remote location with a Starlink connected directly into a Palo Alto 510. We have another backup satellite connection provider which should be used for emergency / comms only when Starlink goes offline.

Starlink renews its DHCP lease every 5 minutes. Normally, this works fine, and gets renewed successfully without interruption.

Once in a while, the lease expires seconds before Palo Alto renews it. When this happens, the backup satellite connection kicks in and takes over (with metric 100).

Moments later, Starlink gets its lease renewed, but it does not take over routing of traffic again, even though it has a metric of 10.

Both connections are in the same virtual router, dedicated interfaces, same DHCP client settings, with Starlink metric 10, other provider metric 100. Both are set to 'Automatically create default route pointing to default gateway provided by server'.

Getting someone to physically reboot the Palo Alto at the site when this occurs is the only recourse to get it back up with proper routing.

I simply dont get why Palo wouldn't properly inject and use the lower metric route when the DHCP gets renewed. What am I missing here?

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Starlink DHCP Route Injection dropping if DHCP expires briefly