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DHCP: still stuck

darobin on 2002-04-11T21:11:26

I'm still stuck in this very uncool situation of having on one side a win box that connects to my DHCP cable provider (Noos) but commonly fails to access the web, email, or IRC easily but it's a *really* lousy box (plus email has problems of its own), and on the other side a perfectly functional Linux box that totally fails to get an answer from the DHCP server...

I've spent the better part of the past few days looking at tcpdump tell me the same thing over and over for any option that I tried with every DHCP client I have and with all sorts of network configuration. I see my DHCP broadcasts. I see some random noise on the network caused by other machines there. I even see the broadcast answers from the server to other boxes, but it never answers mine. The firewall is just about as down as it gets, but somehow I'm not getting anything back.

This is starting to bother me *very* much because I've got tons of email to send, I've got work to get done if I ever want to have some money again, and I'd like to drop by see the cool people on #axkit again.

If you know anything about such problems I'd love to hear about it. At this point I'm ready to sacrifice chicken on the modem. I'm ready to try pretty much anything. If you can help, even just a little, I'll be eternally indebted. I'll buy you beer. Not a pint, a keg. I usually manage to check email twice or thrice a day, so that should be ok.

This new technique of typing stuff into a text editor and pasting it here during the working connectivity / no windows crash moments is somewhat very reminiscent of the time when I had to pay for dial-up connection and would do as much as possible offline and then rushing to use it while online...

sigh....

some second-hand ideas

jmm on 2002-04-11T21:42:14

I've seen discussions on the local (Toronto) linux mailing list about connecting the the local cable provider. There are different symptoms in different parts of the region, depending upon the vintage of the cable company's hardware, but in many parts their boxes use the customer's ethernet interface address (not the IP address, but the 6 bytes hardware ID). There are various alternatives for switching your connecting machine. In some cases, you can wait for a long time until there hardware times out and is willing to accept a new address. There is an DHCP option to force a renegotiate (but I forget the exact details, I'm afraid). Or, you can tell the interface board on your Linux system to use the hardware address of the Windows box, so that the cable system thinks you are the same system as ever.

Re:some second-hand ideas

darobin on 2002-04-12T01:18:52

jmm, you are my new god! I knew the modems did that, but turning it off and on didn't work, no more than leaving it unconnected for 14h so I thought it wasn't the problem. I hadn't thought about changing the address and tried it mostly out of despair.

And miracle! it worked!!! :-) Turns out the modem is tuned on purpose so that people cannot use it on several boxes easily...

Anyway, I owe you big as without the net my situation was becoming ever more critical. If you need help or anything, just ask :) I hope I'll get a chance to pay you lots of rounds of beer some day, perhaps at TPC? Thanks a lot!