Looking for a way to check for status of DHCP connection

[Arjen Verweij <a.verweij@student.tudelft.nl>]

Hi,

I have an annoying problem lately. Sometimes my cable internet (DHCP)
breaks down. It is usually fixable by:

sudo ifdown eth1
sudo ifup eth1

For now I have written a small perl script that runs as root, to do this
for me in case the connection seems to be gone.

Is there a more elegant way to accomplish this? I tried adjusting the
leasetime in dhclient.conf, but it seems the DHCP server of the CMTS
ignores this field.

Please Cc: me on replies, I'm not subscribed to debian-user.

Regards,

Arjen