DHCP DISCOVERs but no OFFERs

[Frank Bulk]

We had a strange problem pop up yesterday that's pretty intermittent.  We
have approximately 1400 cable modems in production and we're getting a few
per day that don't immediately boot up.  

What we discovered looking at the syslog and packet traces is that the cable
modem is issuing DHCP DISCOVERs but the dhcp server is not sending out an
offer.  Then after 15 to 45 minutes, the DHCP server responds with an OFFER
and so on and life is good.

Does anyone have an idea why the DHCP server would act like that, and are
there any ways I can better debug this problem to understand *what* the
dhcpd process is doing that it might be ignoring the DISCOVERs?

We're running V3.0.4 on a Linux 2.4.34-pre4 kernel.

Kind regards,

Frank