persistent something-or-other...
 

First off, I solved this problem, it required a total shutdown of an entire LAN, down to the cable modem, and an orderly restart. Had to do this twice for some reason.

But I had a weird problem: I was running a number of machines and there was a total power failure, about two weeks ago. One machine was running SLAX live CD. (www.slax.org) After power was restored, it appeared everything was normal. Mandriva machines, (2006 and 2007) a Mac and a Win XP box obtained IPs from DHCP normally, but the SLAX distro would not get an IP no matter what I did.

I tried it on a number of different machines, I changed hardware, I tried it on different nodes of the LAN, (different switches) but SLAX simply would not get an IP.

The exact same disk/USB combo would get an IP anywhere else, at my home, at the wife's office... just not in this one location where there had been the power failure.

I assume something of a protocol, a handshake or what have you, was left lingering somewhere after the power failure, probably on a switch. But what this could possibly be is a mystery to me.What (and where) could have persisted, that would interfere with ONLY SLAX, not allowing it to get an IP? What part of SLAX could have contributed to this??

Again, a total flush, twice, of all power system wide fixed it. Never seen anything like this before. Nobody in the SLAX forum seems to have any ideas. I find it odd only SLAX experienced this problem. Helix, Knoppix, Mandriva Move and Puppy also all got an IP with the same equipment...

Just my two cents.

Thinking about the DHCP Protocoll, there is a diffrent approch to get an IP when one allready had an IP. So maybe the DHCP daemon saw the name of the SLAX computer and thought that it allready had an IP sometime in the past and that it should ask about renewal and not about getting a new one.

Just an idea, probably not the reason...