Re: DHCP Question

[rabbit <rabbit@kotnet.org>]

Probably your ISP only lets you use 1 IP address. So, when you have an
active lease (which the install floppy got), you can't request a new one
(which you try when booting from hdd afterwards) until the old one has
timed out (which takes about an hour with my ISP).
A solution should be to manually release the IP you've gotten before
rebooting, thus giving up the lease. I had this problem myself when I
was running linux on a dual-boot system. All I had to do was "dhcpcd
-k". But OpenBSD uses dhclient instead of dhcpcd. Now a quick read of the
dhclient manpage didn't show me how to do this (somebody fix me please
;-)).
Maybe, if dhclient hasn't got a function to release the IP, you can also
get around by copying over the file /var/db/dhclient.leases to the
harddisk before rebooting. This is the file in which dhclient stores the
leases it's gotten, so then, when you reboot, you won't be asking a new
lease, but just asking to renew the lease you've already got, which should
be allowed by your ISP.

 - rabbit


On Sat, 15 Jun 2002, Richard P. Koett wrote:

> I am trying to install 3.1 from CD and i386 boot floppy, and keep having
> a puzzling thing happen with DHCP.
>
> I'd like to preface this by saying that my ISP (Telus) seems to be
> continually having problems providing
> reliable DHCP service, so this may not be an OpenBSD issue at all.
>
> What puzzles me is that while booted from the install floppy, the
> initial DHCP request always seems to succeed.
> However, when I reboot from the hard disk it seems to consistently fail,
> as does running dhclient manually after
> rebooting from hard disk.
>
> Is there something different about how the DHCP request is being made in
> these two instances, or is flaky
> DHCP response from my ISP leading me down the wrong path altogether?
>
> Thanks,
> Richard P. Koett.