Arch Linux

alanh02

Member

Registered: 2004-03-24

Posts: 20

Problem with DHCP and network

I have a Fujitsu Laptop, with wireless and also the standard ethernet port.

At home I have a wireless ADSL router, and the system requests, and gets its IP address perfectly everytime.

In one of my offices the DHCP server is an older machine, much slower and sometimes it doesnt respond with an IP address. In the other office it works fine.

My question is this, what command(s) do I use to force the system to re-request the IP address.

As an aside, on startup the Network reports fail when starting. issuing /etc/rc.d/network start also fails, and yet the network works a treat (apart from the issue above)

Thanx in advance for any help

kpiche

Forum Fellow

From: Ottawa, ON, Canada

Registered: 2004-03-30

Posts: 246

Website

Re: Problem with DHCP and network

Perhaps increasing the DHCP client timeout in /etc/rd.d/network would help:

    /usr/sbin/dhcpcd -t 10 -h $HOSTNAME $1

For my laptop the network script always failed until I set -t 20 (in seconds).

Win

Member

Registered: 2004-03-04

Posts: 155

Re: Problem with DHCP and network

Hi alanh02.

On your comment about apparent network failure using your laptop:

I have a laptop configured to use both eth0 (built-in Intel Pro/100) and eth1 (wireless PCMCIA card). At home, I may or may not use an Ethernet connection to the laptop (for example, if I'm doing administration on the wireless router, I may use the direct Ethernet connection to ensure that I have a connection even if I foul up the wireless configuration). At work, I have both a  direct and a wireless connection (but the wireless uses work-specific encryption different from what I have at home).

Given that my setup expects to connect to BOTH eth0 and eth1 (that's what set up in /etc/rc.conf), if either eth0 or eth1 fails to make a connection, the startup scripts report failure (even though one of them is working just fine).

This annoyance can be solved: There are some utilities for booting Linux with different (say, site-specific) configurations. (I haven't felt the overwhelming need to incorporate one of them, though.)

Regards,

Win

alanh02

Member

Registered: 2004-03-24

Posts: 20

Re: Problem with DHCP and network

Solved it. I didnt really understand what was happening but I think Ive got a handle on it now.

I have the standard network port on the rear of my laptop, and also the wireless networking. I also have a PC card in the slot which gives another ethernet port and a modem. I dont use the ethernet and completly forgot about it

In my rc.conf I had

lo="lo 127.0.0.1"
eth0="dhcp"
eth1="dhcp"
INTERFACES=(lo eth0 eth1)

Which worked fine at home and most places. If there was a cable plugged in then it worked, or the wireless picked up.

When I thought about it (and looked  at IFCONFIG -A ) it occured to me that it maybe responding in order of responsiveness. so I changed rc.conf to be

lo="lo 127.0.0.1"
eth0="dhcp"
eth1="dhcp"
eth2="dhcp"
INTERFACES=(lo eth0 eth1 eth2)

and it all works fine now. Am I correct in assuming it was down to timing?