dhclient output:

Listening on LFP/lo/
Sending on LFP/lo/
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 6
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 10
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 13
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 10
DHCPDISCOVER on lo to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
No DHCPOFFERS received
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

the first time running dhclient the output was somewhat different
showing my isp's ip addresses and connecting me to the net.

after shut down / reboot i ran the program again to get the linux box
online but got the above message unable to access the net through
VMware's NAT (Network Address Translation). might Zone Alarm have
anything to do with this?

BTW i also installed Slack 9 as a Guest OS and running dhclient just
tells me there are "no broadcast interfaces found - exiting".

any advice would be greatly appreciated!

...

the machine that was spewing out the NODCHPOFFERS received message was RHFC. i had disabled network from starting up in to disable eth0 from loading since i'd get an error message being that my desktop is not connected to a network via ethernet cable. i realized that not having network start up would also disallow dhclient communicating with my windows xp internet connecting via NAT. so that's problems fixed.. i also had a feeling it had something to do with zone alarm so i looked around a bit in ZA and found the advanced settings for the firewall and changed the ICS settings to "this computer is a client of an ICS/NAT gateway running Zone Alarm Pro" and inputted my gateway address. that seemed to do the trick! what caught my attention was NAT since I was accessing my dial up connection through VMware's NAT. the only pet peeze i have at the moment with RHFC is that whenever i load up the OS into X windows and do my thing and try to log out it doesn't work so i always have to press CTRL/ALT/BACKSPACE which really isn't a big deal but still. also when i changed the /etc/inittab file to load up the system into console mode and try and start X windows it never loads! so if i ever want to browse the web using a graphics browser although there are programs that use the SVGALIB from the console to do this or use any other application within X to access the web then i'm pretty much screwed unless i fix this new problem.

as for slack 9 still gives me the same dumb message.