DHCP client delayed

  • Thread starter Thread starter Henry Markov
  • Start date Start date
H

Henry Markov

With additional information, I'm simplifying something I asked about yesterday
to the bare essentials.

When my SP2 system boots, my service is automatically started and the first
thing it must do is discover how many ethernet ports are available and what IP
addresses DHCP assigned to them. However I observed that it takes 45 more
seconds until the system issues its first DHCP Discover broadcast.

30 seconds after my service starts it still cannot determine the IP addresses
because the system hasn't asked for them yet and the system terminates my
service. I have found that the 30 second interval exactly corresponds to the
time that my target is displaying the blue splash screen.

What is going on? This did not happen with SP1.

Henry
 
I'm hoping some of the experts will respond in some way. If you have no idea or
think I'm nuts please say so. This problem has my switch to SP2 stopped dead.

More data:
XP Embedded/SP1: DHCP Discover message issued 5-10 seconds before user written
service is started.
XP Pro/SP2: DHCP Discover or Request message issued 6-15 seconds before user
written service is started.
XP Embedded/SP2: DHCP Discover message issued 45 seconds after user written
service is started.

All on the same hardware, all with same service code, all with the same drivers
to the extent possible (ethernet drivers for gigabit ethernet are the latest
XP/Pro and XPe drivers available on the Intel support site).

Henry
 
Henry,

My reply is not going to be helpful to you but I just wanted to say that I know how you feel.
I was struggling with DCHP on my wireless network home when I upgraded to SP2 on XP Pro. I did not spend enough time to sit and
watch with NetMon or Ethereal on the traffic and understand what's going on there. But impression I got was that new SP2 DHCP client
does NOT work the same way as on SP1.

Although my example is not as good as yours (Wireless has always been less stable than just Ethernet), in the end I just had to
switch to static IP on the "DHCP broken" machine.

Obviously, there were some changes in DHCP Client service on SP2 but I don't know if they are related to the issue. Google does not
seem to show much of useful information on the subject and this is probably because SP2 is relatively new stuff.

Although Microsoft folks who have access to the DHCP client source might want to jump in here and let us know why DHCP is such a
pain on SP2.
 
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