AppleTV 3 floods DHCP when ethernet connected

ifconfig may old, but it's just another bsd tool that is still built in. I've always hated networksetup, all of it's arguments are too long

networksetup -listnetworkserviceorder

networksetup -help

… 400 lines

networksetup -printcommands

…100 lines

😠 bleargh

ifconfig isn't editing anything here so ifconfig isn't terrible here is it?

@benji888,

To remove the router from the equation connect the ATV to your Mac via ethernet.

Enable internet sharing on the Macs ethernet port (you do not need an active internet connection, sharing still activates the OS X DHCP server).

Now tcpdump or use Wireshark on the ethernet (or the prettier CPA).

The ATV should flood the Mac's ethernet - if it doesn't there could be a different interaction on the router or network.

You don't need a days worth of logs, a few minutes of capture should show the ATV is malfunctioning.

You can use a static address for the AppleTV without using static addresses for all 45+ devices. In our setup, we only use 2 static addresses, the router itself obviously & the AppleTV. Every other device uses DHCP. I just found that our setup works best that way. I have an ATV2.

Since the ATV3 has 2 interfaces (Ethernet & wifi) it will need 2 IP addresses, one for each interface.

To clarify -- I have our router setup to always assign 192.168.1.2 to the 12 digit wifi interface address of my ATV2. It is a reserved DHCP address and is never assigned to other devices requesting an address. The ATV2 is still set to DHCP, but it always gets the same address.

So I tried the ethernet cable again, no luck. Unplugged the ATV 3 for 30 secs, powered on with the Mini and ATV 3 connected by ethernet, signed out/in my apple ID. Now I get a stationary picture from a movie (stuck on the frame where I activated Airplay). iTunes homesharing works fine, as do my iOS devices, both music and video.

Is there anything else I can try?

My inclination is that Apple broke Airplay with one of their soft/firm-ware updates.

BTW Airparrot works fine. Wish the picture was as big as via Airplay. Now that is a workaround!

Have you considered that assigning the static IP might just be a useful test, can you try it to test? It may help others if it alters this behaviour, especially the ones who do not have 30 years of experience, the equipment or knowledge to test correctly.

You could assign the static address on the Apple TV via it's network settings, perhaps manual mode could make it stop asking for new leases provided you add the correct subnet mask etc. If possible it may be worth setting a fixed address on the wifi interface (or disable wifi if the ATV will allow it). I don't have an ATV, I'm just trying to think up possible solutions.

I understand this looks like a bug from the latest update & if that is the case it should be fixed, in the mean time figuring out a workaround may help with stability for other users.

Mario MG wrote:

Please folks, no more static advice, as I previously stated, setting static turns off the DHCP requests in the ATV so the flooding does not happen, but that is not what I want.

You have just posted a potential workaround for other users, which was all I was asking for, thanks.

You have made it clear static is not an option for you, but for every other ATV user it might help.

I have the same problem.

I recently moved from a commercial router to a custom build Linux router and now i can see the stream of DHCP requests from ATV3 in my logs.

Ever since I switched my ATV3 to use Ethernet instead WiFi I started to have issues; mainly that airplay would not wake up ATV3 anymore and i had to manually start ATV and then connect via airplay which i never had to do when the thing was using wifi.

Obviously there are workarounds: use wifi or the static IP, but that is not the point and I am with Mario on this one. ATV3 should work just like anything Ethernet connected ,and the fact that this issue was reported to Apple and nothing is happening tells me that they don't care. They probably have enough customers that do not look into this kind of detail. If the customer doesn't know there is a problem then there is no problem right?!

You seem to have misunderstood my intentions.

I don't disagree with what you said, Apple should fix it. I'm simply here trying to suggest that if workarounds can be found maybe sharing them could benefit everyone, is that unreasonable?

Any response to this from Apple yet?

I have just realized that this problem is occurring - I have three ATVs and each has it's own static IP. Logs show that each unit is requesting a new lease approximately every 2 minutes.

Thanks for this, Mario. I was looking at my router logs for a completely different reason, and noticed that our AppleTV (not sure of rev - it's probably a 2) was requesting a new lease every minute or two. For me, the workaround of switching it to WiFi was the easy choice. No more DHCP flooding now.