Troubleshoot DHCP

This is an attempt to help troubleshoot DHCP issues.

First let me attempt at explaining how DHCP works to better understand how to troubleshoot it.

Let's talk about DHCP at the home which is more simple.  Your router typically does everything to providing wireless signal for you to connect to as well as route traffic to your internet provider via a cable modem or other device that connects you to the internet.  The router also provides DHCP to all the devices in your home like your phone, iPad, Smart TV, Apple TV, computer, Playstation etc..

So what happens when you connect a device to your WiFi or plug directly into your router with a network cable?  The new device calls out and says, "I want an IP address" and the DHCP server see's the request and assigns them the next available IP address.

You can confirm this on your device...

• Windows - in the search bar type cmd and command prompt should pop up, click on that then enter ipconfig /all and press enter.  This will give you your ip address as well as a few other very helpful bits of information like the servers that resolve a name to an IP called DNS servers, also you'll see your default gateway which is typically the ip address of your router (the way out of your network to the internet).
• Mac/Linux - you can run ifconfig | egrep 'mtu|ether|inet' and it will show you the IP address next to inet and the ether is the hardware address

What if you don't have an IP address?

Here is a couple suggestions

1. Typically a reboot of the system is the default action since we know that rebooting a device will request an IP address if it doesn't have one.
2. In Windows you can type: ipconfig /renew and it will request a new IP address from the DHCP server