Thank you David and Herbert. I will test the dhcp package in someday, but now with bootpd on a sparcstation I'm happy. The tcpdump says very few about the problem. I got the following message. 13:20:35.273259 0.0.0.0.bootpc > 255.255.255.255.bootps: xid:0x1dc2499d secs:10 [|bootp] The "secs:10" differs around the samples. There is no answer from Debian/Alpha machine for this request. Regards, Naohiko Shimizu