dhclient stops trying to get a new lease

[Nicolas]

Hi,

I have a cable modem with dynamic IP, and a FreeBSD 5.3 server just 
behind. This server gets its IP with the help of dhclient.

Today I got a huge down because of a problem on the ISP side. During 
that time, dhclient made his job trying to get a lease every 4 minutes, 
unsuccessfully of course.

But at 10 AM, after 10 hours of trying to get a lease every 4 minutes 
(unsuccessfully of course), dhclient completely stopped trying. Thus, 
when the line came back up, it didn't got its lease. I had to manually 
tell him to get that new lease...

Why did it stopped trying ? What should I do to tell him to try forever 
until it can acquire a lease ?

Here is a part of my /var/log/messages :

/* the line went down at midnight. dhclient gets a "fake" IP */
Jan 28 00:00:44 sun dhclient: New IP Address (vr0): 192.168.100.11
Jan 28 00:00:44 sun dhclient: New Subnet Mask (vr0): 255.255.255.0
Jan 28 00:00:44 sun dhclient: New Broadcast Address (vr0): 192.168.100.255

/* 4 minutes later, it retries */
Jan 28 00:04:55 sun dhclient: New IP Address (vr0): 192.168.100.11
Jan 28 00:04:55 sun dhclient: New Subnet Mask (vr0): 255.255.255.0
Jan 28 00:04:55 sun dhclient: New Broadcast Address (vr0): 192.168.100.255

/* [...same thing repeating over and over...] */

/* another time... */
Jan 28 09:57:59 sun dhclient: New IP Address (vr0): 192.168.100.11
Jan 28 09:57:59 sun dhclient: New Subnet Mask (vr0): 255.255.255.0
Jan 28 09:57:59 sun dhclient: New Broadcast Address (vr0): 192.168.100.255

/* the last dhclient-related block.. This time it's a bit different.
** after that block dhclient no more tries anything... */
Jan 28 10:00:45 sun kernel: vr0: Using force reset command.
Jan 28 10:00:45 sun dhclient: New IP Address (vr0): 192.168.100.11
Jan 28 10:00:45 sun dhclient: New Subnet Mask (vr0): 255.255.255.0
Jan 28 10:00:45 sun dhclient: New Broadcast Address (vr0): 192.168.100.255

/* finally I had to restart dhclient to get my "real" IP, once the
** cable came back */
Jan 28 19:34:18 sun kernel: vr0: Using force reset command.
Jan 28 19:34:57 sun dhclient: New IP Address (vr0): 81.66.254.111
Jan 28 19:34:57 sun dhclient: New Subnet Mask (vr0): 255.255.254.0
Jan 28 19:34:57 sun dhclient: New Broadcast Address (vr0): 81.66.255.255
Jan 28 19:34:57 sun dhclient: New Routers: 81.66.254.1