Wireless: DHCP IP lease attempt failed

Question

Hi,
did an upgrade today and now I get the above error message, when trying to connect to my router with netcfg2. The exact error message is like following:
[root@tux matthias]#
[root@tux matthias]# netcfg2 home
dhcpcd: wlan0: ignoring DHCP message; no Server ID
dhcpcd: wlan0: ignoring DHCP message; no Server ID
dhcpcd: wlan0: ignoring DHCP message; no Server ID
dhcpcd: timed out
:: home up - DHCP IP lease attempt failed [FAIL]
My /etc/network.d/home looks like that:
CONNECTION="wireless"
INTERFACE=wlan0
QUIRKS=(prescan preessid)
SCAN="yes"
SECURITY="wpa"
ESSID="wirelessbox"
KEY="..."
IP="dhcp"
TIMEOUT=30
I did nothing except updating. Everything worked fine before that.
Any hints?
EDIT: I added the QUIRKS line after getting the error message, because a guy on IRC suggested that. This didn't help either.
Last edited by mamr (2009-05-11 12:46:11)

Answer 1

rsmarples wrote:
dhave wrote:
rsmarples wrote:You can't "turn the message off" as such. You you see the ignoring message then the DHCP packet really is ignored. So if you see that message AND dhcpcd still works with a proper IP (ie not ipv4ll) then you have 2 DHCP servers running on your network and one of them is fautly.
Thanks for the explanation. Is this a problem to have a broken DHCP server running for no purpose? Is this hurting my gas mileage or anything?
Well, you're probably better off finding the faulty router and disabling it.
dhcpcd presently selects and uses the first DHCP working reply it gets and if the server is "fixed" to send ServerID then you could get conflicting lease information.
I see I have a lot to learn. The reason it's finding two routers is that I have a modem-router and then, in another part of the house, an access point that I've configured as a repeater (actually, since it has a separate ssid, maybe it's not considered a repeater; I don't know).
When I move my laptop from my office into the living room, I often switch from connecting through the "repeater" and connect directly to the modem-router. It's at this point that I get the messages about "no server ID". So, in fact, dhcpcd is doing what it's supposed to be doing, I guess.
I need to do some reading and try to figure out if my setup could be cleaned up so as to avoid lease conflicts or whatever. When I fool with network stuff, I'm always working beyond my level of understanding. I usually just fiddle until I get things to work, which means I probably could do a lot to streamline and improve performance.