In the recent versions of Fedora/Ubuntu, I found that if the DHCP server assigns a reserved address, the address is not applied to the system. Finally I found that adding the below in /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf, would fix the issue.
send dh-client-identifier = hardware;
Well if you have not heard about dnsmasq:
Dnsmasq is lightweight, easy to configure DNS forwarder and DHCP server.
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It is designed to provide DNS and, optionally, DHCP, to a small network.
It can serve the names of local machines which are not in the global
DNS. The DHCP server integrates with the DNS server and allows machines
with DHCP-allocated addresses to appear in the DNS with names configured
either in each host or in a central configuration file. Dnsmasq supports
static and dynamic DHCP leases and BOOTP for network booting of diskless
machines.
