RHEL5 DHCP Client Fallback

We have a few legacy RHEL servers for historical lookups.

The Servers are set to obtain eth0's IP info from DHCP

We are looking for a simple way to have the IP set if the DHCP server is unreachable, or fails to respond.

the Config file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 is currently set to:

DEVICE=eth0
TYPE="Ethernet"
ONBOOT="yes"
USERCTL="no"
BOOTPROTO="dhcp"

When it works correctly the IP comes back as 10.10.10.23/24 DG 10.10.10.250

We would like to have the card fall back to the same parameters, in the event that the lease is not renewed, etc.

Currently we have someone who simply manually edits the config file/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
TYPE="Ethernet"
ONBOOT="yes"
USERCTL="no"
BOOTPROTO="static"
IPADDR="10.10.10.23"
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"

We can not leave it statically assigned, for reasons outside of this post.

We need it to automatically fail to this configuration in the Event that the server reboots and the DHCP Server is unavailable, OR if the LEASE is unable to renew at the end of the lease.

The Solution will be a simple step by step instruction on how to accomplish this under RHEL 5 SystemV