No DHCP offers received - hardware is known good

[bongoman]

FC5 has been running fine for some time. After a reboot several days ago, I have not been able to bring up eth1 (one of the two built-in NIC's on the motherboard - the one with the network cable installed :-).

/var/log/messages shows:
kernel: r8169: eth1: link up
dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth1 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 7
...
dhclient: No DHCPOFFERS received.

ifconfig eth1 says:
inet6 addr: aaaa:bbbb:...
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:400 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frames:0
TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0
RX bytes:36224 TX bytes:0
Interrupt:201 Base Address:0x6000

I know the hardware is good - I can boot off a Knoppix live CD and see the internet just fine. eth1 is given an IP address of 192.168.1.104. Also, I have a laptop on the network which receives its IP address from the DHCP server (a Linksys router/switch).

I have removed any old configurations with system-config-network and verified that there are no old config files in /etc/sysconfig/networking.

Also, I plugged the NIC directly into the router, but had the same problem.

AMD 64 3200+
K8N Neo2 motherboard
Two build-in NIC's:
eth0: nVidia CK85 (not cabled to router)
eth1: Realtek RTL-8169 (is cabled to router)
Linksys Wireless Access Point Router (wireless is turned off - all connections are wired)
FC5
kernel 2.6.16-1.2107_FC5

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Fred

[peters]

Right off the top of my head, have you tried any older kernels? Have you looked at /var/log/yum.log to see if the kernel has been updated since your system last functioned correctly?

[bongoman]

A+ You got it in one!
I booted with 2.6.16-1.2096_FC5, and DHCP was happy.

Thank you very much.

[jhetrick62]

Yep, I believe that .2107 was buggy so I avoided installing it and the next kernel came out like 1 week later.

[peters]

You are lucky as I was troubleshooting almost the exact same problem on a test machine I have here. It is actually running FC4 but, for some reason, can only read data coming in from its ethernet. The newest .2XXX kernels would not work, I had to go back to "2.6.14-1.1656_FC4" to get it working. I'm hoping that this will be fixed in later releases.