Your link that you provided does in fact seem to explain this mysterious error. I do not unerstand what "vendor specific" information means, but there does not seem to be answer to it. I DO NOT get this error when I broadcast for a lease with dhclient, only dhcpcd.

Thank you very much for solving this mystery for me. No one on any other forum has been able to provide this information. Now if there was a cure for it, that would be great. But according to man dhcp:

So whatever the problem is with DHCP on my machine, it is not changable..

Bob

Well, I suspect that dhclient simply ignores that packet.

However, the dhcp server that is running on your gateway is broken. Sending a zero length option 43 packet is NOT in accordance with RFC 2132.

It appears that the Slackware version of dhcpcd is *very* old. See http://roy.marples.name/projects/dhc...DhcpcdDownload

From what I saw scanning the 5.1.5 release code, the newer version won't barf on a zero length option 43 packet. (Which makes sense since the client couldn't care less about that option.)

Sooo, you could attempt to build and install dhcpcd-5.1.5 and see if that works. Plus send a bug report to Pat. :-)

Thank you Richard. You have no idea how much I have dug into finding not just a solution, but understanding the error itself, and you are the first one I have come across who seems to understand it. I will try your solution and download that package. I will report back if it works.

The gateway is a brand new Zytex router that I just purchased about four weeks ago. My old Belkin finally gave up the ghost on wireless after 7 years of use. I have a number of other machines, Linux and Windows, and Slackware is the only distro or OS that has the issue. As a matter of fact, I have another laptop which is newer and has meatier specs (dual core, 2GB mem) and I run Slackware -current on it. It internmittently also fails to get an IP address, but simply restarting /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 just once gets me an IP address (using dhcpcd), but during boot it fails and falls back to a 169.XXX.XXX.XX address. I also run Ubuntu, Fedora and Crunchbang on other machines and none of them have this issue, so it is definitely a Slackware problem.

I will do as you suggested and submit a bug report to Pat, but the version of dhcpcd on Slackware -current is 5.2.1. The version on Slackware 13 stable that I have installed on the old P4 is 3.2.3, which indeed must be pretty old.

Bob

@ Bob

If you haven't already, it is probably a good idea to link back to this thread from the others you had going about the issue. Someone sometime will need that info I'm sure.

Thanks, damgar. I will do that now.

Bob

Ah. I haven't been tracking -current so I didn't know that he's jumped a couple of releases there. I'm running Slackware64 13.0 (not current) myself.

BTW, I'm glad to have helped (despite my screen name). This stuff isn't hard per se, but sometimes you have to snuffle around in the documents to see what is supposed to happen. I do this for a living so I have an idea what to look for. :-)

Just thought I would report back on the results of your suggestions to upgrade dhcpcd. IT WORKED!! I downloaded dchpcd 5.2.2 from the site you provided. I used gnashley's src2pkg app to convert it to a Slack package, and did upgradepkg. It installs dhcpcd to /usr/sbin and it must be moved to /sbin so that /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 can find it. But on restart, I got an IP address first time.

Hope this information helps someone else with this issue.

Bob