Win2000 and XP Machines Not using dhcp

[pizzaman2003]

Interesting scenario maybe someone has seen this before?
I have 7 machines running windows 2000 pro. 1 Machine using windows xp pro and 1 server running windows 2000 server. There is a linksys router in place and also a linksys switch. All machines go into the switch which inturn connect to the router. Last night the xp machine decided to use it's own private ip in the 169 range. Our Dhcp would normally give out 192.168.1. something.

In order to get the xp machine back on the network i needed to statically assign an ip address. This seemed to solve the problem but it should really be using DHCP. Now today seems like since I did that there are 3 machines that also decided to use their own private ip's in the 169 range and not dhcp. Did the XP Pro machine start a trend for the others to follow how do I get the machines to get out of using their own private ip addresses?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated...

Thanks,
Pizza

 

[PcLinuxGuru]

The 169. address you mentioned is the Microsoft assigned IP when your NIC doesn't get one from anywhere else. So that would tell me that your machine isn't communicating correctly with your DHCP server.

A nice tool to further trouble shoot that is a packet sniffer so you can see what happens when you try to renew the IP.

 

[DanClark86]

if i were you the first thing i would do is check the scope to make sure it is not disabled. if it is not disable i would restart the services for DHCP Server. if that fails Blow away the scope and recreate it. but what ever you do, the odds are that the DHCP scope is not functioning so stop trying to troubleshoot the workstations, they will dirve you crazy

 

[pizzaman2003]

I will give these suggestions a try and post back my results thanks for the help.

Pizza

 

[starbuck777]

It would seem that your DHCP server has stopped working / been turned off?

The reason your machines started dropping the IP address assigned would be due to the fact that the DHCP lease had expired and a new lease couldn't be negotiated. "ipconfig /all" at the cmd prompt will tell you what the lease times are for your clients.

One thing that isn't clear is who is giving out the DHCP address? The Linksys router or the Win 2000 server?

 

[pizzaman2003]

The linksys router is giving out the DHCP to the clients and it looked like it had stopped from observing the event viewer on the server. I restarted the DHCP services on the router but was just kind of strange why when it expired it didn't renew the lease to the workstations? They are all up again. Any suggestions?

 

[histobastifish]

I found that if you disable DHCP on the Lynksys things seem to work properly. That is of course if the server's DHCP is configured correctly.

"Scientists have proven that living actually causes death."

 

[Whoheard]

Check your Linksys firmware. There is something wrong with it and it does not function well using DHCP. This has been an on-going problem and it does not seem that Linksys is going to fix it. Maybe now that Cisco owns them it will get fixed. Take everything static and this will solve your problem.

 

[pizzaman2003]

Thank you all for your assistance =)

Pizza