BOOTP/DHCP Beacons

[bill at billhorne.homelinux.org (Bill Horne)]

Thanks for reading this.

I'm getting BOOTP/DHCP beacons from my cable modem at 500 ms intervals,
and I'd like to understand why.

Here's the log of a single packet:

Jul  3 13:18:12 billhorne kernel: IN=eth0 \
OUT= MAC=ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:00:b0:8e:f5:10:70:08:00 \
SRC=24.147.2.140 DST=255.255.255.255 LEN=576 TOS=0x00 \
PREC=0x00 TTL=249 ID=46839 DF PROTO=UDP SPT=67 DPT=68 LEN=556 

Now, I know the cable modems use DHCP, but I'm confused:
why would the DHCP server need to beacon, especially at 
500ms intervals? Isn't it supposed to wait for a request?

Bill Horne
.