On 16 Oct 00, at 8:08, Ramalingam Swaminathan wrote:

> Recently, we had two NIC Cards failing at the same locations on two
> different systems running Windows 98 SE. NICs are ALN 320 10/100 Fast
> Ethernet Cards ( Acer / Aopen ) . The NICs  picked up IP addresses from
> a  fictitious range and as a result displayed  all sorts of errors on
> boot up, crashing the operating system. I did manage to reinstall the
> cards after removing the drivers from safe mode. I could ping to the
> localhost and the IP it acquired but could not see the network.  The
> only solution available to me was to replace the NICs. I tried testing
> these NICs at a different site ( with static IP ) but it failed to work.
>
> The site has other systems with similar NICs and they seem to be having
> no issues. Has anyone faced similar issues of NICs acquiring IP
> addresses different from the scope specified in the DHCP servers?
>
> Thanks and Regards,
>
> Ram Swaminathan

  I'm betting these addresses are in the 169.254.x.y range, right?

  If you search the RFCs (don't have the numbers that cover DHCP
handy), you'll find that this is the reserved "link-local" range.  A
DHCP client that cannot find a DHCP server is allowed/supposed to
randomly allocate itself an address from this range.

  About the most common time I've seen this is when the DHCP server
is at a different address now than the last time the client got a
lease.  [In our case, this is usually because a laptop client machine
has been moved from one site to another.]  Setting a static address,
and then resetting back to use DHCP, usually is sufficient for it to
forget where it thinks it knows the server is, and so successfully
obtain a new lease.

David G

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