[PLUG] Comcast lease problem

Dr. Terry L. Bonner doctorbonner at comcast.net
Mon May 28 18:41:38 UTC 2007


On Mon, 28 May 2007 11:21:59 -0700 (PDT)
Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 28 May 2007, Brian Beattie wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 05:36 -0700, poor02 at bejay.com wrote:
> >> I was wondering if anyone else was having this problem. Recently, 
> >> my ip lease with Comcast is only for an hour, instead of several 
> >> days, and it won't auto-renew itself. I called tech support, which 
> >> was useless. Also, the gateway address I keep getting changes,
> >> from 71.193.182.1 to 71.236.172.1 to 67.160.144.1 to 67.189.90.1.
> >>
> >> Nothing in my setup is changed. I have a 3com hub. Everything
> >> works fine for as long as the lease runs.
> >
> > My first reaction is that Comcast is doing this on purpose to stop 
> > people from running servers and maybe to mess with torrent as well. 
> > That may be giving Comcast too much credit.
> 
> While my Comcast has been static for the better part of a year now, 
> I'll note that I saw some oddities in my Apache logs last night. Take 
> a peek at these three entries:
> 
> c-24-20-160-119.hsd1.mn.comcast.net - - [27/May/2007:20:07:02 ....]
> c-24-20-160-119.hsd1.or.comcast.net - - [27/May/2007:20:07:43 ....]
> c-24-20-160-119.hsd1.mn.comcast.net - - [27/May/2007:20:08:52 ....]
> 
> See the DNS flip-flop between 'mn' and 'or' in the hostname? Same IP 
> address, different names. It's almost like someone at Comcast is
> using the holiday weekend to move a block of IP addresses between
> Minnesota and Oregon -- or maybe someone made a mistake. Perhaps the
> address block you've been assigned is part of the migration/mistake.
> 

Thanks for that info.  It seems reasonable to assume that such an event
would be either a maintenance glitch or a one-time response to some
abnormal routing event.  To think that Comcast, whatever else may be
their many sins, would actively attempt to thwart subscriber efforts to
run torrents is profoundly disturbing, on so many levels.

I just can't conceive of any circumstance where Comcast would become an enforcement agency for the MPAA/RIAA.  But I'm just not savvy
enough to make any kind of informed statement on the topic.

My own personal experience with their technical/support staff is such
that I am inclined to such occurrences to happenstance rather than
intention.  After all, these are guys who told me that I had "contact
Linux" in order to get my modem hooked up.





Terry
_______________


All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.
     
    -Aristotle



More information about the PLUG mailing list