It turns out raspberry pi doesn't try very hard to get an IP address with dhcp, during a power failure, my rpi booted faster than the dhcp server, and never got an IP address. In such a situation, the rpi seems to be booted, but it doesn't get an IP address, and I never see a dhcp request from it until I reboot it again.
dhclient is run as such:
dhclient -1 -v -pf /run/dhclient.eth0.pid -lf /var/lib/dhcp/dhclient.eth0.leases eth0
I can't find any way to alter the arguments to dhclient, the -1 argument might be the culprt. How can I make my raspberrypi retry dhcp requests until it gets a reply ?
Edit: this is concerning the Raspbian “wheezy” distro.