I have a problem with a Debian Jessie server running as an Intranet VMWare virtual machine.
This machine has been recently upgraded from Debian 7 Wheezy to Debian 8 Jessie (expecting continuing later to Debian 9 Stretch), and it was working fine in the previous release.
The problem is that it previously had a static IP address (192.168.0.63), but know it unexpectedly started using a DHCP IP assignment that seems to be hardly stuck on it and impossible to remove, even after uninstalling any package dedicated to contain a DHCP client.
This DHCP assignment seems to occur at boot time, as you can see on the following picture which shows the beginning of the boot sequence :
The closest already asked question that I found about it is on this page, but none of the provided solutions works, essentially because they all refer to modifying files that do not (or no longer) exists on this virtual machine, and most of the time not even the directories containing them.
I am stuck on this for days, I tried to remove all packages whose name contains the string "dhcp", and I even also tried to wildly delete all FILES on this machine whose name contains the string "dhcp", but nothing works.
I also looked inside the GRUB bootloader configuration, also without success.
This doesn't seems to be configurable from the VMWare virtual network interface, nor from its virtual BIOS.
The network interface always continues to get the unexpected IP address that I do not want.
Which package does contain this DHCP client that I do not want? How can I remove it? Do I have to recompile the kernel in order to revert to a statically assigned IP address? How can I kill all of these demoniac, available and possible DHCP clients and slay all of them definitively?
/proc/cmdline
.BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.16.0-6-686-pae root=UUID=0ad23b20-d341-4c8e-a259-bf39f781efe3 ro quiet
This doesn't looks like netbooting, AFAIK.ip=off
on the command line, but I think it’s better to investigate the root cause.