I have a ibook with Public Beta installed on it. The operating system runs smoothly with not problems. Me and my roomate have set up a small lan in our apartment with our cable modem using a linxus router and a hub. The linxus router supplies dhcp to all of the computers. When I first log on with os x I am assigned a normal 192.168.1.* ip address. After a while I will notice that none of my transfers are working properly. If I check my network settings it has changed my ip address to a 169.254.*.*. Even if I reboot the computer or try to manually configure my settings it will not give me a good ip until I turn it off and try it again later.
I had a problem similar to this when running DP 4 on the same ibook, i don't know if it's the computer or if it may be one of the applications i have installed.

Thanks,
Joe Hinkle

It sounds like your dhcp lease is expiring and not getting renewed. See if you can't boost the lease timeout to something very, very large (or turn it off). Just a thought. Also, if you've configured your firewall with ipfw to block all incoming traffic under port 1023, you may not be getting bootp packets when the lease needs to be renewed. It should be open for ports for 67 and 68.

[Since EBCDIC]

What brian says :-)

Whenever you see any DHCP IP which starts with 169 you know that it had trouble.

I run DHCP at the office and never have this problem, so I would expect that it's something to do with how DHCP service is configured on the server.

On another note, is there a reason you're using DHCP for such a tiny LAN? I would think you would use static IP, either true IP or NAT if you don't have real addresses to assign. (But you should be able to get DHCP to work in any case...)