DHCP question

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

TWIMC,

I've just inherited a new pentium, so I decided to put an "everything"
RedHat box together.

I set the Ethernet card to dhcp, and the installation went OK: but the
initialization failed on boot, i.e., the card was not receiving an IP
assignment from my (RH 7.1) server.

1. Manual configuring the card (via ifconfig) went OK, and I could ping the
server.
    I could NOT ping anything beyond it.
2. DHCP worked OK on the same port, with a Windows 98 box.
    It received the address I expected, i.e., the highest address in the
range I'd specified.
    I did NOT specify a MAC address.
3. When I went back to the new RH box, and entered the MAC address of its
    ethernet card in the server's dhcpd.conf file, dhcp worked OK, and now I
can ping
    a host out in the cloud.

It's working, but I'm very puzzled. Any explanation?

TIA.

Bill Horne