Getting rid of dhcpcd on RH 7.2?

[Rich Braun]

Is it possible to make dhclient work on a network of Red Hat 7.2 boxes?

Problem:  frequent power outages
Symptom:  the RH 7.2 boxes stay offline after outage
Analysis:  LAN has a single DHCP server which is slow to come up.

RH 9 comes up OK because it has dhclient, and most everything else on the LAN
retries until the dhcp server comes online.  I've done a fair amount of
googling and it seems there are a lot of complaints about RH 7.2's dhcpcd
setup but no obvious solutions.  It would be more than a little bit of work to
overhaul everything to a newer distro.

Related question:  what are the pitfalls of setting up a second DHCP server on
a LAN?  I don't think it's possible to set up a secondary to serve dynamic
pool addresses but it should be possible to service known MAC addresses with
'static' IPs kept in dhcpd.conf.

-rich