Ok. I understand about Bad_Address and the things that can cause it. That said, I am using Window 2003 and we are running DHCP. Yesterday we had a series of short power outages. Some were right after the other (1 or 2 seconds) others were 10 to 40 seconds in between. The server (of course) has a UPS and so does most of our infrastructure (switches etc).
But it seems that one type of Printer that we have, were all switched to bad_address and they could not pick up their reserved IP address. Some of them seemed to remember their IP and are still functional, even though their reservation says bad_address. I assume they will fail either at lease renewal or the next time they are power cycled. What surprised me was that these bad_address entries' reservations were changed to have an invalid MAC address.
All of them start with a 0 or a 1 and are only 8 characters long. 0401150a, 1701150a, 1901150a, hmmm. i see a pattern forming. They all have unique first 3 characters, but everything after that is 1150a. That led me to figuring out what this number is. It's an inverted hexadecimal representation of the ip address that is being complained about. Why would the DHCP server replace the MAC with this convoluted string? Is this covered in any manual? I am pretty sure it's not in the DHCP RFC.
Not sure why it was having the problem, unless somehow the printers were powering and made the DHCP request then discovered that the old lease information was kept somehow (remember, some of the outages were very brief) after the request had gone out. But that, and nothing else I can think of makes sense. And it only happens on one model of our printer. At least so far. And this isn't the first time we've seen it happen this way.
Any ideas appreciated.
Chris