DHCPCD Problems with Cox's new network

[Craig White]

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
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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