I was re-organizing the office/data center/room full ‘o cables today and needed to reboot the router/internet server. Judge of my amazement when Comcast refused to supply a new network address for it.
How do I know it’s that and not something else? Easy: I plugged in my iBook, got a different address, and all was well. Then I plugged the other machine in, nothing. In fact, I was getting the same address it had before, even after I wiped out the dhclient.leases file.
I swapped the cables to the cards, adjusted the myriad of files that needed it, rebooted and there it is, networked and ready, with a new network address (different from the one it had before for 25 days or so and from the one the iBook was issued). So obviously, they’re doing something incomprehensible like binding to a hardware address and refusing to expire old leases upon request.
Calling Speakeasy just moved up my to-do list.