The DHCP package comes with both a client (called dhclient) and a server program for using DHCP. If you want to install this package, the instructions can be found at . Note that if you only want to use the client, you do not need to run the server and so do not need the startup script and links provided for the server daemon. You only need to run the DHCP server if you're providing this service to a network, and it's likely that you'll know if that's the case; if it isn't, don't run the server! Once you have installed the package, return here for information on how to configure the client (dhclient). To configure dhclient, we need to first install the network service script, /etc/sysconfig/network-devices/services/dhclient included in the package. make install-service-dhclient Next, create the ifconfig.eth0 file with the following commands. Adjust as necessary for additional interfaces. Note: this will overwrite any existing file. cat > /etc/sysconfig/network-devices/ifconfig.eth0 << "EOF" ONBOOT=yes DHCP_START="[place appropriate start parameters here]" DHCP_STOP="-r [add additional stop parameters here] SERVICE=dhclient EOF For more information on the appropriate DHCP_START and DHCP_STOP values, examine the man page for dhclient. You should then create the /etc/dhclient.conf using the following commands. Append to the file if you have more than one interface: cat > /etc/dhclient.conf << "EOF" # dhclient.conf interface "eth0"{ prepend domain-name-servers 127.0.0.1; request subnet-mask, broadcast-address, time-offset, routers, domain-name, domain-name-servers, host-name; require subnet-mask, domain-name-servers; } # end dhclient.conf EOF Finally, if the DHCP configured interface is used as your default gateway, you should remove the GATEWAY and GATEWAY_IF variables from /etc/sysconfig/network: sed -i "s/GATEWAY/#GATEWAY/" /etc/sysconfig/network