Redhat 7.2, kernel 2.4.17, iptables compiled in. DSL service through a hub. No authentication (hostname, user, MAC address, whatever) required.

I can manually call ifconfig eth0 up and then dhcpcd to connect. No problem.

My simple script

#!/bin/sh
/sbin/ifconfig eth0 up
/sbin/dhcpcd eth0

does not connect me. Ifconfig tells me that it loaded eth0, but didn't find me an IP address. No blinkies, no nothing. The one-two combo I mentioned above gets me a connection inside 10 seconds every time. The scripted dhcpcd timed out. After I try the script, running ifconfig / dhcpcd myself from the command line does not work, either. After a reboot everything's okay again.

Any ideas?

Have you tried manually editing the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 file to setup dhcp on boot. Here is what mine looks like

DEVICE=eth0
IPADDR=
NETMASK=
BROADCAST=
ONBOOT=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
NAME=3c509

If that isn't working then what NIC card are you trying to use. I have used both PCI and ISA this way and it all seems to work fairly simply.

It's an integrated NIChip on a SiS 735 AMD mainboard. Like I said, the NIC itself works fine, and dhcpcd works when I call ifconfig and dhcpcd separately from the command line. I'm connected via dhcpcd right now, enjoying the wonders of X.

I've tried what you suggest. All I get is a long delay and no result. Leads me to believe that it doesn't want to run from a script, init or otherwise, so I wonder what I've got set wrong to cause this.

I don't have the NAME parameter set. But why would that make things more difficult from a script, rather than from a manual program call?

It seems that it just wants to be lame. Just to make sure but did you check the /etc/modules.conf file to make sure that you had your alias setup correctly for the NIC. If that doesn't help then I don't have anything else to add. This is a really wierd situation.

Try putting a "-d" option on your dhcpcd line and run it again. Then check your system log to see what happened.

Also, could it be a timing issue? Maybe put a "sleep 10" between the ifconfig and dhcpcd lines.