said by neumannu47:How could a hardware failure cause a router to stop handing out IP addresses when everything else on the router appears to be working? If the issue is software and not hardware, what changed?
Presumably you checked all of the relevant settings on the router. If clients are just defaulted to DHCP the request/offer process should be automatic, as you probably know. Is there any possibility there is another device on the network that is running DHCP server? If that device is offering bad addresses, that could be a problem.
The best way to figure out what's going on is to run Wireshark to look at what's going on behind the scenes, although there's a learning curve with that.
Make sure everything is plugged into the router properly. If you have a new router, you should be able to test the DHCP on the old one by disabling DHCP on the new one, and just plugging in one of the old router's LAN ports to one of the new router's LAN ports.
You should be able to run DD-WRT but check out Toastman's Tomato, too. I never had major issues with the Netgear firmware but Tomato does a lot more than either DD-WRT or Netgear's.