[PLUG] Comcast lease problem

[Keith Lofstrom]

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.

Everybody is at home for the three day weekend, with you, surfing. 
All the college students are home, trading songs while mom does
their laundry.  Lots of data moving.  I imagine that is causing
Comcast to do all sorts of rearrangements to adapt.

The Comcast dynamic IP is just that.  I once hired a sysadmin to
help set up my firewall, and he hardwired the dynamic IP address in
a bunch of places (DNS, iptables, etc) because "it never changes".
That plagued me for years, until I learned enough to set up the
network addresses correctly.

You can get your DNS at a place like dyndns.org, and run software
that detects IP address changes and resets the dyndns.org URL to
IP mapping in a minute or so.  Moving IP addresses will still
confuse torrents, though, and a lot of mail servers out there won't
talk to a dynamic IP address - too many spammers use them.

If you want a fixed IP address and a server, either pay Comcast for
the privilege, or run a VPN tunnel to an offsite machine with a
fixed IP address.  I do the latter, and I no longer care what IP
address Comcast assigns to me (as long as it does not match the 
IP address range of my internal 192.168... network).

Keith

PS:  the second sysadmin I hired knew better than to rely on a 
dynamic IP, so there are good ones and bad ones.  When you are 
smart enough to tell the difference, you are probably smart
enough to do it yourself, sigh.

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs