Nope – same behaviour – I left it copying, came back after a couple of hours, box is on (blue light etc), display on the TV but apparently no network – no response to ping and nothing higher level.

I’ll go and look in the syslog on the box but anything particular that might be a “known issue”?

Currently I have the Foxsat set to “Manual” IP configuration with a simple fixed address etc, set in the onscreen menus.

I could set it to DHCP and set an address reservation for it based on MAC address, but I thought a simple fixed config would be if anything less likely to cause issues.

Side point – while it was booting I just watched the DHCP server log and the Foxsat MAC clearly requests a dynamic address (which it is given by the server) then this is overriden by something later on. When finally booted it is definitely using the static address and not the one issued by DHCP. – this confirmed by what it’s listening to and also from ifconfig when logged in.

I’ve just looked on the box from an SSH shell and

/etc/network/interfaces shows eth0 as dhcp which would be logical from the above behavior.

I wonder if DHCP is actually still running (I can see a udhcpc process) and after a timeout it makes a new DHCP request, gets given an address and this overwrites the static config set at boot. That would fit and be an entirely reasonable oversight, not seen by anyone using entirely dynamic addresses.

I’ll set an address reservation to the same as the manually set IP and see what happens. If it is as above it’s a minor but noteworthy bug – “Manual config will be ignored after a timeout”.

Will update after further digging.

Confirmed –

As suspected after a timeout of a couple of hours I have just watched the box make a DHCP request and the server issues a new IP as I didn’t have a specific reservation assigned. (It is set statically in the range with my servers not that range issued dynamically).

After the request it activates the new address. I’m not sure if it activates all the DHCP extended option details (gateway etc) – if it is ignoring those and only changing the host address it might explain REPASSAC’s observed behavior.

Immediate fix is simply to assign a fixed DHCP reservation based on MAC, then either use DHCP all the time or let it make the request when it times out and get given the same address as set statically. Thankfully using dnsmasq I can set a specific assignment out of the dynamic range.

That works fine, but it is a little gotcha others may find – ideally the firmware should disable the DHCP client if a static IP is set in the menus, but I do appreciate the use of static IP’s is probably relatively unusual these days and more people set things as reservations on routers which would hide this.