Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Odd DHCP Issue

So today I was working on a odd issue with a Meraki MX-64 firewall and two MS220 switches.

One network with two VLANs. One data VLAN and one voice VLAN. Pretty vanilla. The phones are all VoIP broadsoft phones are completely unaffected in their safe voice VLAN. Everything else in the data VLAN are pulling APIPA addresses if they didn't have a DHCP reservation. Also I learned that if I removed the reservation and cycled the interface it would not come back even if I added the reservation back.

Now here is what I did. I did packet captures on the switch uplink and I see the DHCP discover messages going through. But not on the interface on the firewall. Remember this is only for the Data VLAN. The phones seem fine. So naturally I checked the DHCP settings and they were correct. I checked the VLAN settings and those were good too. I looked for a rogue DHCP server and found nothing.

Everyone had left the office for the day so I was free to troubleshoot as I pleased. I threw a hail Mary and rebooted everything. No change. I have a device on the network that runs CentOS for troubleshooting and runs a network monitoring. It's on VLAN 100 and was fine because it had a reservation. It's the device that went offline as soon as I removed the reservation and cycled the interface. So I created a new VLAN and then added it to the interface. Boom goes the dynamite and it came online.

As far as I know there were no configuration changes or cabling changes. Everything is as it was when it was working. They already had the carrier out before they even called me. The whole network is up and fine. I'm at a total lose and even Meraki support was stumped.

Any thoughts? Ideas?



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