I have around 60 Lenovo ThinkCenter neo 50q Gen4 desktops that are all facing the same problem with DHCP. When the network interface card (NIC) tries to renew its DHCP lease, it ends up with an APIPA IP address, while the subnet, gateway, and DNS servers get renewed correctly. Interestingly, our WiFi controller has no issues with DHCP at all.
When I manually run 'ipconfig /release' and 'ipconfig /renew', the NIC is able to successfully get a new IP from DHCP. Similarly, if the user restarts the desktop, the NIC correctly renews the IP. All these desktops are running Windows 11 version 25H2. We've been in touch with Lenovo's support for weeks but haven't made much progress.
I've ruled out the DHCP server since it's hosted on a Windows server, and there are over 300 devices successfully pulling IPs from it—only these 60 desktops are having trouble. I even tested one of the desktops on our IoT network, which uses a different DHCP server on a Palo Alto device, but the renewal issue persisted.
We've tried different NIC drivers from Lenovo and even obtained the Realtek driver, yet the issue remains. Currently, we are testing Ubuntu to see if the problem occurs with a different operating system. Does anyone have insights or similar experiences?
5 Answers
Do you have a spare network card you can test with? It might help narrow down if the NIC itself is causing the issue.
What kind of switches are these desktops connected to? Also, check if spanning-tree portfast is enabled—it might help with the DHCP renewal issue.
Have you tried using a static IP? If that works, check if you can ping the default gateway, DNS, and DHCP server. Make sure your VLAN IP matches the subnet configuration on your switches and the DHCP scope.
We had a similar problem with a batch of HP EliteBooks and docks. Updating the firmware on the docks resolved the DHCP renewal issues for us.
It seems more like a network problem than a device one. If it was solely a device issue, I would expect more models to have the same problem.
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