This error has driven me nuts for years, and I have finally figured out how to fix it.  My clue came from  when I was trying to reimage a workstation with Ghost and got a "no DHCP server" error, even though the workstation was plugged into the network.

Sometimes when we reboot, it starts working but more often than not, it doesn't.

So here's the "fix".  Go ahead and log into the workstation without Novell.  Then disable the networking connection, and then reenable it.  It only takes one try so far.

The weird part is that I have the IP address of the server hardcoded, so we should ever see that message.  However, I don't think it is a Novell problem, I think the workstation really didn't get an IP address correctly.