Greetings All, I am trying to set up a firewall box for a friend who wants to house a small LAN with access to the Internet via a cable modem. His ISP provides dynamic IP addresses with DHCP and I'm using the office network at work to test the setup of the firewall box. I'm having trouble getting dhclient to behave on SUSE 6.4. Over the last couple of weeks the dhclient hardly (if ever) seems to get an IP address, and when it fails it appears to set off a fork bomb of dhclient-script instances that (in around 2 hours) makes the machine (a pentium 166) grind to a complete halt (not even seeming to process any keyboard input). Looking in /var/log/messages after each instance of the problem (after renaming dhclient-script to stop the fork bomb killing the machine) I see either a repeated sequence of (IP address in line 2 changed to protect the guilty): dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4 dhclient: DHCPOFFER from 123.123.123.123 dhclient: DHCPDECLINE on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 (the time between the first and second line is always less than a second, and the time between the second and third line is 5 to 6 seconds) or I see a repeated sequence of: dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 2 dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5 dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on eth0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9 .... dhclient: No DHCPOFFERS received dhclient: No working leases in persistent database - sleeping. It is known that our DHCP server is sometimes not very reliable, which explains the second type of error, but not the first. Why would the dhclient refuse the dhcp offer? And why does the dhclient-script fork bomb every time it fails to get an address. I also have been using the SuSEfirewall package, but I don't think that it has any impact on this particular problem, because the above symptoms still occur when the firewall is turned off (START_FW="no" in /etc/rc.config). (As an aside, I had a to add an ipchains rule to the SuSEfirewall script to permit DHCP requests to be transmitted without the firewall blocking them (even though I had set FW_SERVICE_DHCLIENT to yes in /etc/rc.config.d/firewall.rc.config). The logs showed that the dhcp requests were tagged with the IP address of the firewall box's other network interface (which has a static 192.168.x.y address) and were thus presumably being blocked by the rules on the "forward" chain.) Any help with the dhclient problem would be much appreciated, Jason McDonald. -- Random Signature #117: Maths and alcohol don't mix - never drink and derive.