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Date:      Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:30:47 -0800 (PST)
From:      Luke Dean <LukeD@pobox.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Gripe about new dhclient
Message-ID:  <20051229115929.P1560@border.crystalsphere.multiverse>

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Ever since FreeBSD switched to OpenBSD's dhclient, I've had a serious 
problem.  I'm running 6-STABLE as of earlier this week, but the problem 
has existed ever since we switched dhclients.

Whenever I take the system offline long enough for the lease to expire, it 
will never get a new lease.  On startup dhclient appears to broadcast 
requests for an IP address, but it never gets one.

Once this situation occurs, the only way to get an IP address is to delete 
the leases file.  I picked up this tip from someone on the list a few 
months ago, and it works.  I even read that some people have gone so 
far as to create scripts that delete the leases file automatically 
somewhere in the boot process.  I really don't want to do this.  It's a 
hack and it defeats the purpose of having a leases file.

This morning I spent an hour on the phone talking a nontechnical person 
through the process of deleting the leases file so we could get the server 
back online after it had been offline overnight, and I'm not going to do 
that again.  I want to stick with the new dhclient program since it's the 
one that FreeBSD has adopted as its standard, but I can't live with this 
behavior.  Does anyone have a good solution?

my /etc/dhclient.conf is
prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1;

my /etc/rc.conf contains
ifconfig_vr0="DHCP"
and does not override any standard behavior for dhclient.

This machine connects directly to a DSL modem, so there's no firewalls or 
NAT to interfere with getting an IP address.



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