[Techtalk] weird networking problem

[Maria McKinley]

Hi there,

I have a couple of machines that are set up with static ips in 
/etc/network/interfaces.

on July 17 at 9:44, I edited interfaces to read:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface
#allow-hotplug eth1
auto eth1
#iface eth1 inet dhcp
iface eth1 inet static
         address 10.208.108.16
         netmask 255.255.255.0
         gateway 10.208.108.10

I restarted networking, and the new ip worked just fine, but later the 
machine decided it would really prefer the dhcp address it use to have, 
  and suddenly changed its ip. There was nothing in the logs about 
renewing the dhcp address, or networking problems at all, my connection 
just timed out and it was suddenly using its old ip. I have had a couple 
of machines do this recently, all of them ones that I have just recently 
installed the operating system on. Older machines have happily kept 
there static ips. Kernel version seems not to matter.

Ideas? Anyone ever heard of this?

~maria