Uprade to 7.04

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Sun, 06 May 2007, tedmoore99 at satx.rr.com wrote:

> I am running a small (12 terminals) system and have recently upgraded to
> 7.04.  Before upgrading the 12 terminals would connect in about 3 - 5
> minutes.  Since the upgrade, only about three terminals come up in 3
> minutes.  The rest seem to hang up and I have to reboot several times.
> After about one hour or more, all the terminals will eventually connect.
> Is there something about 7.04 that I am unaware of that might cause this
> behavior.  The messages I get from the non-connecting terminals is
> "Searching for DHCP", then "NO IP", repeated many times.

Strange, it sounds like your DHCP clients are not getting a response from
the server.  That's sort of strange, particularly if you're using PXE
network booting (which would imply you had already got a response from the
dhcp server once).

To check what's happening, you can run tcpdump somewhere on the network
(say on the server) as the machine boots up.  You should be able to see
requests and responses.  This command will do that for you:

	sudo tcpdump -i eth0 | grep DHCP

assuming eth0 is the network interface the dhcp is happening on.

One thing that has happened to me a few times is that where there are two
network cards in a machine, the PXE network card boots up and does the
first DHCP, at which point the linux kernel comes up and attempts to get
its IP address by DHCP on the other network card.  It might be worth
checking you only have one network card.

Gavin