Re: IP addresses

[Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 27 Feb 2003, Jeff Crosby wrote:
>
> She's on W98 so I did an ipconfig /release_all followed by ipconfig
> /renew_all.  The renew, which usually takes 5 seconds, took over 20
> seconds.  The IP address she got was 169.xxx.xxx.xxx (don't remember the
> last 3 octets) with a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0.  I never did figure out
> how this happened.
>

The 169 address is the normal result when DHCP cannot find a DHCP
server.

> After I got home, I remember I was in the midst of setting up a new PC
> running XP Pro (our first one) when this happened.  Is there something
> about XP Pro that it would try to hand out IP addresses and 'beat' the
> iSeries to it?  I looked at services on this XP Pro machine and saw
> 'DHCP Client' but that's also running on my W2K machine.  I'm not sure
> where else to look.  Could she have done something to her W98 machine to
> cause this?
>

It's possible that something is out of whack in windows with her driver
setup.  Registry problems were a big issue in Win95 networking...  but, I
didn't encounter that in Win98.

But, probably more likely, this is a hardware problem.   Usually, in my
experience, it's a bad network card.   But, could be the cable, hub,
switch, etc.   In any case, the problem is most likely that it's not
communicating with the network at all.

The last time I saw this symptom, it was because the user had supplied his
own ethernet cable, and it was a crossover cable.  That took awhile to
figure out, since the cable was brand new, I didn't suspect it...  :)

If you really want to eliminate DHCP as the cause, try setting the PC up
manually... assign it an address/netmask/etc instead of using DHCP.  If
the PC can't ping anything on the LAN, then the problem is not DHCP.