I made the mistake of creating a DHCP exception based on the MAC address of my wired interface on my laptop.  I promptly forgot I did it.  It wouldn’t be an issue in a small environment, but we have roughly a dozen data access vlans which could be recieving DHCP addresses.  I kept running into the problem where at work, I couldn’t get an address from our DHCP server.  The complicate things further, but ultimately made me realize what the problem was, both my Windows and Linux installs bombed out pulling an address.  I knew the issue wasn’t the actual NIC as it worked fine at home and on my little pix 501 test box.  Yesterday I realized that I had put the exception into one of the DHCP scopes.

When my laptop tried to pull an address, it would see the DHCP exception and try to assign it a specific address.  That address was in a VLAN that wasn’t allowed in most of buildings/areas.  It’s always fun to sabotage yourself!