Re: DHCP timeout is too short for this college network

[Daniel Gnoutcheff <daniel gnoutcheff name>]

John Mahoney wrote:
> On Ubuntu 9.10 it appears you can edit the file /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf 
> and uncomment the line timeout in the file and increase it to say 180 
> seconds.

Thanks for the suggestion! Sadly, it didn't work.

I'm running Ubuntu 9.10 too, and I do indeed see that the config file 
gets copied as you indicate. I tried replacing
> #timeout 60;
with
> timeout 360;

But N-M continues to impose its 45-second timeout:
> Jan 11 21:20:00 dan-lap NetworkManager: <info>  Activation (eth0) Beginning DHCP transaction (timeout in 45 seconds)
> ...
> Jan 11 21:20:46 dan-lap NetworkManager: <info>  (eth0): DHCP transaction took too long, stopping it.

I suspect that /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf only controls dhclient's 
timeouts. The dhclient timeouts are already OK for me. The thing I need 
to change seems to be the additional 45-second timeout that N-M imposes; 
if dhclient takes longer than 45 seconds, N-M kills it.

When I run dhclient manually, I avoid this additional timeout. Once 
that's out of the picture, dhclient is allowed to run its course, and it 
usually succeeds.

As far I can tell, N-M's timeout is hard-coded, but I'd be delighted to 
be proven wrong on that. ;)


I also investigated the possibility that the slowness was caused by 
tree-spanning (with help from Gavin). However, I'm pretty convinced 
that's not it.