[TriLUG] dhclient woes

[Bill Farrow]

Hi TriLuggers,
At work I run several ubuntu boxes (10.04) out in the lab that are
used to test and manage our prototype embedded boards.  They happily
dhcp their address and allow me to ssh into them from my desk or from
home.  Normally everything works great.

On Friday night I was doing some maintenance to the company
file-server and dhcp-server.  The dhcp server was offline for about 60
minutes, and once it was back up I confirmed that my desktop could
renew it's lease.  On Sunday I tried to remotely access my lap boxes
and could not reach any of them...

Once I arrived on site, I found that the lab boxes had not renewed
their dhcp leases since Friday night.  Restarting their network fixed
the problem.  My understanding of dhclient is that it should retry
every 5 minutes if it fails to obtain a lease.  I would like to avoid
this problem in the future.  Google searching did not turn up anything
of interest on this problem.  Which is why I ask you guys.

/etc/network/interfaces
  auto lo
  iface lo inet loopback
  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet dhcp


Bill