Plus, it’s often important to ask questions when answering them. Especially for those who don’t understand the basics of looking at logs, error messages, etc. I don’t usually fall into that category, but still — asking questions is a good technique when done right (you did it right).

Anyway, no harm done. I enjoy your posts here and you should drop me an email if you want to chat more anytime.

Someone, possibly you, had a rant on their blog a while back about people asking questions such as mine in response to posts such as yours, and how annoying it is. If you’d wanted help, or a solution, you’d have asked for it – you were just venting, and suggestions such as mine are just annoying..

I should have been more clear in my original post. dhcpd is one of my own personal bugbears – every time I try to set it up, there always seems to be some little inexplicable thing that stops it from working until, magically, it just starts, and I’m never really sure why. I was actually asking for my own reference, in case it helps me next time I have to set it up, not intending to offer suggestions to you..

You’re right though, dhcpcd is the client daemon :)

The script produced no output that I could find, other than saying “failed”.

I never tried that command.

Well, my understanding was that dhcpcd was the dhcp client, but only one script was installed in /etc/init.d/ and it was dhcp. There were no additional dhcp* scripts in there, like for the server side. That’s what tripped me out.

The command to start the daemon was /usr/bin/dhcpd.

Does the script produce any output? Are there logs in /var/log/syslog or /var/log/messages?

What output do you get if you run “sh -x /etc/init.d/dhcp”?

And.. umm… my fuzzy recollection suggests that /etc/init.d/dhcp may well be intented to start a dhcp client – is there possibly an /etc/init.d/dhcpd or etc/init.d/dhcp3d script as well?