“The DHCP behavior while triggered by some issue also showed that the OS could be a poorly behaving DHCP client. This seems like a concern because it could potently be triggered by something different than whatever was addressed in 2.1.4(new).” — perhaps I didn’t explain this correctly: with the bug in the old firmware 2.1.4, if time changes (say, after NTP sync, time has gone back 1 minute), this could immediately trigger the device to reconnect due to DHCP renewal timeout, and the precise reason is that the bug turns a negative number into a large positive number; when the first DHCP request comes back, time hasn’t elapsed that much yet, so it still thinks DHCP has expired and sends out a second request. This goes on until the timeout turns back from a large positive number (which should have been negative) to 0, and then it will stop sending DHCP requests. Hope this makes sense.