A few months ago, after installing a new Debian sarge home server with DNS, DHCP, IMAP, etc. I found the weirdest problem. My linux systems all communicated with the DHCP server fine. However, my wife's iMac, my MacBook, my Nokia handheld, the Wii, and pretty much every other wireless device I had in the house would just ignore any IP that the DHCP server would offer. I dug through tcpdump data time and time again without any indication as to what the problem was. After messing with it for weeks, I finally replaced my dhcpd.conf file with a fresh one, and modified it only slightly. Low and behold, it worked, and I haven't messed with it since.

With the extra holiday time, however, I decided to finally get dynamic DNS working. This meant that I had to start digging into dhcpd.conf again. This time, however, I only added a few extra options at a time, and testing the configuration file with a restart and an IP renew on my wife's iMac. I found the problem. Apparently, the server-identifier setting breaks DHCP on all other systems than linux. I don't know why. Maybe there's some voodoo curse. I don't care. It works now, and hopefully, someone else having this problem will be saved weeks of research by stumbling on this post.

Happy Boxing Day!