Okay, I need some help. I have 3 boxes running at home, two linux, one XP. On linux box 1, I store all my docs in a software RAID (a pain in the arse, but worth it!) and run NFS and Samba. My second linux box is a combo router and LAMP stack with two NIC interfaces, an integrated Intel 10/100 NIC that points to the cable modem and the internet running a DHCP client, and a trendnet 10/100/1000 NIC pointing towards my internal network running DHCP3 server.

The problem is, that after much googling, I can't for the life of me get the DHCP server to work; it refuses to hand out leases. The system log is flooded with errors like "packet length xxx disagrees with yyy bytes received" and also somewhat ominously, every half second a group of eth0 "tx_watch / tx_timeout / after: tx_done_idx" messages.

From what I can tell, something is wrong with my eth0 card (which is the internal NIC) which may or may not be what's wrong with the DHCP server. So, is it possible my nic is truncating packets, leading to this garbage in the log, plus, the confused server? If that's the case, is this a driver issue, or hardware issue?

As if that weren't enough, on the file server with the single NIC, I can't even use ifdown / ifup. The configuration in /etc/network/interfaces is fine, and ifdown releases its address (which is an old DHCP address), but ifup just causes it to hang. The system is unresponsive, even to the kernel magic keys.

Help! Let me know what else you need and I'll post it here within a few hours.

Thanks, Tim.

Is dhcpd running on the DHCP server?

Can you post the IP/Subnet the internal interface is configured with, as well as the dhcpd.conf file?

What does the internal interface plug into, and are the duplex settings correct?

Thanks for your suggestion, but after I uninstalled DHCP3 (its for a small, internal network so I don't need the latest and greatest) I had no problems getting an older version of DHCP to work. As an upside, I also got a local DNS out of it, so that's a nice perk. My suggestion to anybody else having that problem is try dnsmasq.

As far as the problem with the NIC goes, I still have it. By dropping into a console before I used the ifup command, I found out its a bug, the CPU does a soft lock when I try to bring the card online, so, its broken, and only new drivers will save me. As long as I don't use ifup, its gravy.

Thanks again.