Update: Last night I turned off the MAC address logger. This morning I looked and OS was responding to pings normally. I turned the MAC address logger back on and there was no activity for 15-20 minutes until 5:59AM. Then there was a burst for the same DHCP messages until 6:00. Now back to quiet. I’ll leave the logger on and watch for a little while this morning.
Misc info and other experiments if needed:
The DHCP lease time is 3 days. The router does not show lease info for static leases so I can’t say when the current lease is expected to expire from the router’s perspective.
Other experiments I could try:
Release the lease and see how the OS reacts.
Change the router to provide a regular DHCP address (with a shorter lease time) and observe.
Change the OS to a static IP and observe the behavior with the MAC logger. A week or so back while gathering info on this issue I set it to a static address and got into the same ‘Connecting…’ state.
A little data is a dangerous thing…
With the data I have, the ping behavior fits.
The OS ‘loses’ its IP address and makes a DHCP request (SRC: 0.0.0.0). When it’s in that state the ‘host unreachable’ response to ping makes sense.
It gets its address (192.168.1.32). Now pings work.
But it doesn’t seem to know that it’s got an address and makes another DHCP request (SRC: 192.168.1.32). It then ‘loses’ it and starts over.
Given the amount of activity, the ping timeouts also make sense.
OK, I should leave the speculation to the experts. 🙂