[PLUG] DHCP and winXP clients

[Stephen Gran <steve@lobefin.net>]

Hello all,

I am having a problem with a small LAN.  The basic setup is a linux
(Debian woody) box that connects via pppoe to the isp, and then does
some basic filtering, NAT, print sharing, dns, and so forth for the LAN.
The LAN is all WinXP at this point (6 or so boxes).

Recently I switched the LAN to DHCP from static addresses, as some users
kept complaining that the 'repair' function in WinXP didn't repair
anything, but in fact made things worse.  From what I can gather, the
'repair' thing essentially releases any dhcp lease, flushes the arp
cache, tries to renew a lease, and then sends a bunch of netbios
discover packets about.

Now that I have installed dhcp3-server, when a users hits 'repair', I
see this:
Oct 29 17:08:58 free dhcpd: DHCPRELEASE of 192.168.0.100 from 00:30:ab:1b:52:71 via eth1 (not found)
Oct 29 17:10:00 free dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.0.100 from 00:30:ab:1b:52:71 via eth1
Oct 29 17:10:00 free dhcpd: DHCPACK on 192.168.0.100 to 00:30:ab:1b:52:71 via eth1
Oct 29 17:10:07 free dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from 00:30:ab:1b:52:71 via eth1
Oct 29 17:10:07 free dhcpd: DHCPOFFER on 192.168.0.100 to 00:30:ab:1b:52:71 via eth1
Oct 29 17:10:07 free dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.0.100 (192.168.0.1) from 00:30:ab:1b:52:71 via eth1
Oct 29 17:10:07 free dhcpd: DHCPACK on 192.168.0.100 to 00:30:ab:1b:52:71 via eth1

and no lease gets written to /var/lib/dhcp3/dhcpd.leases.  On the client
side, they see 'error flushing the arp cache', but they get a new
address.  The only out of the ordinary thing I did was give a couple of
addresses fixed-address lines in dhcp.conf - they get the same errors as
everyone else, though.

The DHCPRELEASE (not found) message is esay enough to guess - there's no
entry in the leases file to release.  Anybody seen anything like this
before?  I would say that it's a client side problem, except that it's
consistent, and it happens to all of them.  I don't know dhcp that well,
but I thought it was a pretty transparent thing - you shouldn't have to
do much to get it going.

Is this going to be a situation where I have to allow dhcp to update
dns?  I had hoped to stay away from that.
-- 
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|  Stephen Gran                  | If you want to get rich from writing,   |
|  steve@lobefin.net             | write the sort of thing that's read by  |
|  http://www.lobefin.net/~steve | persons who move their lips when the're |
|  			         | reading to themselves.   -- Don Marquis |
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