How to renew a DHCP lease

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

The standard method to renew a DHCP lease is to go through System Preferences -> Network, select the interface to be updated, for example “Ethernet 1”, authenticate as admin user, click “Further Options…”, then click “Renew DHCP Lease”. However, an easier way is to issue the following command in Terminal:

echo "add State:/Network/Interface/en0/RefreshConfiguration temporary" | sudo scutil

The command

networksetup -listallnetworkservices

returns a list of all (potential) network interfaces,

networksetup -listallhardwareports

displays a list of hardware interfaces (called “hardware ports” in order to distinguish these from virtual interfaces like bonds or VPN interfaces), device names and Ethernet addresses, and

networksetup -getinfo "Ethernet 1"

for example returns the current configuration of the Ethernet 1 interface.