Continued network problems

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Mon, 23 Jun 2008, Krsnendu dasa wrote:

> The main problem is that dhcp sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.
> e.g. Sometimes 5 terminals boot up at once and then the 6th won't.
> Then later it will boot.

If you run this on the client:

	sudo tcpdump -i eth3 port 67 or port 68

you should be able to see the dhcp requests from the client and responses.
You can therefore see if your server is responding to each request it gets
and how quickly.

> Dhcp also takes a long time to restart when I do it from the command
> line. Like 2 mins or so.

 - If you stop it and then separately start it, which takes the time or is
   it split between the two?  
 - Are there any logs in /var/log/syslog which suggest a problem with
   dhcpd.  
 - What is the load on the machine (the output of the uptime command will
   tell you)?  
 - During the minute, if you run "top" does dhcpd appear near the top?

> (It is running from eth3 because eth0 and eth1 are from the previous
> motherboard setup.)

You probably need to comment out the entries in /etc/iftab to solve this.
Then things will fall back to eth0. eth1, etc.

Gavin