# SYNCDHCP does not always wait for IP?



## stasiana (Jan 6, 2013)

I've just got a 9.1 installation finished. With the SYNCDHCP insight, I've been able to get an IP addresses reliably ... or so I thought.

Turns out that in about 50% of the reboots, the computer fails to get the IP. However, this was better than before SYNCDHCP, when about 90% of the reboots failed to get the IP.

If I use SYNCDHCP and don't initially get an IP, and I do an ifconfig nfe0 down followed by an ifconfig nfe0 up, it seems to get an IP _almost_ all the time.

I thought SYNCDHCP was supposed to stall the boot process until an IP was retrieved. How can I diagnose what's going on?


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## wblock@ (Jan 6, 2013)

It waits for dhclient(8) to return.  But that's not a guarantee that it got an address, it might have just timed out.  Could be due to a slow DHCP server, or a card that is slow to initialize.


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## stasiana (Jan 6, 2013)

I don't believe that's the case. I don't see a long pause during boot. Perhaps 5 seconds max. My dhclient.conf file is empty and the default timeout is 60 seconds. I'm certainly not waiting a full 60 seconds during boot.

Is there any way I can get dhclient(8) to output a detailed log file so I can see exactly what happened? As it is I can't tell what's going on at all. dmesg(8) doesn't say anything. /var/log/messages has minimal information.


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## stasiana (Jan 13, 2013)

Eh. Couldn't get this thing working. Went back to Linux where I've never had these problems.


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## cpm@ (Jan 13, 2013)

You can use the defaultroute_delay option in rc.conf to make the system wait a while before bringing up the default routes. See rc.conf(5) for tuning better.

```
defaultroute_delay="30" # Time to wait for a default route on a DHCP interface.
```


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