DHCPCD Problems with Cox's new network

Mon, 28 Jan 2002 20:34:04 -0700

I, too, have a LANCity.  I finally just had to plug in my Cox IP address
statically.  Perhaps they'll finally change it out.

Jeffrey Pyne wrote:
> 
> I've been having trouble, as well.  I thought I had it all figured out, but
> apparently not.  I did spend almost 2 hours on hold Saturday morning
> (listening to Tori Amos or Enya or whomever-- I requested AT LEAST two songs
> for the hold music, and the tech support guy replied that many other people
> had requested the same thing).
> 
> Anyway, I found something interesting:  I had been having trouble getting a
> DHCP lease for the past week.  Sometimes I would not get a DHCP_ACK from
> their server.  Other times I would get one and I would get my old @Home IP
> address, but then I wouldn't be able to ping my default gateway or connect
> to anything on the Internet.  When I finally spoke to someone Saturday, I
> told him that I was getting an IP address of 24.x.y.z, but that I couldn't
> connect to anything on the Internet.  He said, "Hmmmm, that's an @Home
> address; you should be getting an IP address that starts with 68."
> Interesting.  He wanted me to look at my "Workgroup" setting, so I quickly
> connected my Win98 box to my cable modem and reconfigured it and rebooted.
> He had me change the Workgroup to "@COX.NET" and reboot.  But while I was
> futzing around with this, he said a supervisor had just told him that their
> "provisioning server" was down and that I would not be able to get an IP
> address from DHCP until it was back up (oh, and there was no E.T.A.).  After
> I expressed my displeasure and hung up, I tried rebooting the Win98 box just
> for fun.  When I did, I immediately got an IP address and could connect to
> resources on the Internet.  Bizarre.  I connected my firewall back up and
> ran 'dhclient ne0' and I got my old IP address again (even after deleting
> /var/lib/dhcp.leases, which is an OpenBSD thing)).  I tried manually
> assigning the values I received on my Windows box to my firewall, and then I
> could connect.  So are they using some DHCP server that only hands out IP
> addresses for computers in the same "Workgroup?"  If so, what about Macs
> (which they support)?  I'm confused....
> 
> Also, a guy at work said that he was told this weekend that the old LANCity
> modems don't work with the new network (or rather, they work, but only
> intermittently).  (And indeed, http://status.cox.net/view.asp shows that
> this is an issue.)  My co-worker is trading in his modem at a Cox office
> today.  I have a LANCity modem, too.  I think I'll trade it in just for the
> hell of it.  What kind of modem do you have?
> 
> ~Frustrated in Phoenix
> 
> On Sunday, January 27, 2002 Steve Ellis wrote:
> 
> > As many of you may know, @home is going under and Cox Cable has built it
> own
> > network and is transitioning its customers.  My Linux firewall quit
> working
> > the other nite and after many hours I have determined the problem - for
> some
> > reason the Cox network is not responding to my DHCP client.   My system is
> > an old Pentium 166 and has two ethernet cards installed - eth0 connects to
> > the cable modem; eth1 connects to my home network.  I'm running a DHCP
> > server on the home network side (eth1 - static IP address 192.168.1.1) and
> a
> > DHCP client on eth0.  I am running Red Hat Linux 6.1 and using the dhcpcd
> > (ver 1.3) client.  I have tried to run both dhcpcd and pump from the
> command
> > line and both timeout.  I have also tried dhcpcd with and without the -h
> > <HOSTNAME> option.  Cox technical support says that their DHCP server does
> > not require a hostname to be provided to their new DHCP servers.  The
> > network traffic is extremely heavy as customers are logging into the Cox
> > servers to establish new mail accounts, move data on webservers, etc.
> >
> > I am logging dhcpcd messages to a separate log and it shows the following
> > sequence of events:
> >
> >      DHCP_REQUEST for an old IP address
> >      Timeout waiting for DHCP_ACK
> >      broadcast of DHCP_DISCOVER
> >      Timeout waiting for response from valid DHCP server
> >
> > It appears that dhcpcd was working up until the other nite.  The
> information
> > in dhcp-eth0.info shows an IP address in the new range (68.3.xxx.xxx), new
> > domain name (ph.cox.net), etc.  I cleared the info in dhcp-eth0.info and
> > have verified that dhcpcd is not updating the information.
> >
> > In the interim I have replaced the Linux box with a Linksys
> router/firewall.
> > It runs some kind of DHCP client and is able to talk to the Cox DHCP
> server
> > and get information.  It works fine, but provides little protection.
> > Unfortunately, I can't observe the traffic between the cable modem and the
> > router.
> >
> > The problem may have something to do with the need for dhcpcd to send a
> MAC
> > address as part of the DHCP request.  I had to configure the Linksys
> router
> > of a friend of mine to clone the MAC address of the adapter card in his PC
> > after connecting the router.  This would imply that Cox has sniffed MAC
> > addresses of PCs on its network and will only respond to requests from
> known
> > LAN cards.  In my case, I thought that Cox may have sniffed the MAC
> address
> > of the router and would only accept requests from it.  To test this, I
> tried
> > invoking DHCP from the command line using:
> >
> >      /sbin/dhcpcd -d -h<old @home hostname> -I <router's MAC address>
> eth0.
> >
> > I assumed the MAC address format is xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx.  The man page for
> > dhcpcd doesn't document the format.  Anyway, this didn't work either.
> >
> > Any insight or suggestions would be most appreciated.
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> >
> > Steve Ellis
> ________________________________________________
> See http://PLUG.phoenix.az.us/navigator-mail.shtml if your mail doesn't post to the list quickly and you use Netscape to write mail.
> 
> PLUG-discuss mailing list  -  PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss