It is very silly but the default on the ifup-eth script tells dhclient ( the program that obtains a DHCP IPaddress if you have selected DHCPin your ifcfg-eth* config file) to EXIT / QUIT if the first attempt to obtain a lease fails. No amount of dhclient.conf settings will fix this because if dhclient is started with -1 (which it is by default)then dhclient will quit. This is obviously very bad for MOST cases. Say for example you have a power outage or........