DHCPCD Problems with Cox's new network

John Kloian III plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Tue, 29 Jan 2002 09:40:27 -0700 (MST)


I think maybe I can verify that.  I did the conversion with my windows
box, which in restrospect was a bad idea.  since Then i have not been able
to get my firewall to grab an IP.  I can put it in statically and pass
traffic.  When I use pump and watch the logs this is what I see right
before a timeout:

xid: 0x63aabbdf4a rejected <-> 0x64aabbddcf

My suspicion is that this is their dhcp server rejecting my request on
what I can only assume is the MAC address of my NIC.  although I cannot
find any decent documentation.


On 28 Jan 2002, Craig White wrote:

>On Mon, 2002-01-28 at 10:32, 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
>----------
>I thought that someone mentioned that the new cox setup changes from a
>hostname authentication to a mac address authentication to get dhcp
>service. This would suggest that in the conversion process, the first
>assignment with your cxXXXXXXX-x hostname captured the mac address of
>your network interface and locked it down. Thus switching to another NIC
>(computer/router device) would mean that it can't capture an ip address
>unless you call customer support and they release it.
>
>If this is true, and I haven't verified it, this would make it a bad
>idea to use a windows computer to get the ip address from the dhcp
>server and then switching it out for a linux box.
>
>Craig
>
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/****************************************************************************/
/                                                                            /
/  John Kloian III                                    VP Network Operations  /
/  Opnix, Inc.                                             http://opnix.com  /
/                                                                            /
/                     .Innovating Internet Intelligence.                     /
/                                                                            /
/****************************************************************************/