Ahh @Home...and a bit of a question.

[PrinceofWands]

I love @Home. No really I do *gags on the sarcasm*. All right, I have 3 IP's from @Home and the second one is somehow corrupted (more on this later). So I call up to have them remove the IP from service and get a new one. Tier II used to handle this so I ask to be transfered up. I learn that they took that right away from Tier II. So I get transfered back down. I explain it to Tier I...they tell me it's taken care of. I go online and get a new third IP. Guess what??? It assigned my old IP address to the new computer name. So (after first grabbing a total of 5 IP's just to be safe) I call back and re-explain it all to them. They tell me it's Tier II. I tell them what Tier II said. They transfer me anyway. I talk to Tier II. The assure me they can't do it, it's Tier I now (and this time I knew the guy so I trust him). Back to Tier I. I re-re-explain it to them. I'm informed that "they can delete my computer name with the bad IP, but there's no way for them to take the IP out of the loop. Also there's no way to report this problem to their provisioning department unless it's during business hours so I can speak directly to them and tell them what's wrong." So I tell him forget it, just delete the two extraneous accounts and note it all in the ticket. The only good side to all this was getting some credit on the next bill and now all three IP's are on the same block so I can finally have my network set up the way I want without a lot of hassle. Jeez Louise.

Now for the question: Why was my IP corrupt? Background: A & B computers were on same IP block (24.10.67.xxx). Periodically (sometimes 2-5 minutes, sometimes 4-6 hours) I would lose connectivity with the B computer. I would still have my DHCP info active, and could ping my own IP and local loopback, but couldn't get to the gateway with pings or traces. A never had this problem. When I reformatted B it kept happening. When I set A up as B it started happening to that one as well, when I traded it back to A it worked fine. It couldn't be the gateway because they were the same for A & B. A DHCP release and renew would fix the connectivity. Setting static I would still lose connection, but then there was no way to get it back without restarting (since release and renew are pointless static). I also got these problems when I was with Tier II and was told 'the IP's bad, escalate it'. What is a 'bad IP', how does it get that way, and what is done at the administration level to correct it - if anything.

 

[Garion]

Bad IP. BAD!

In all seriousness, a bad IP is probably one that is conflicting with another machine on your network. That's one dangerous thing with the @home network design - There's a bunch of people sharing one subnet and there's nothing to prevent them from picking another IP from the range and assigning it to themselves. Of course, when they happen to pick yours you go tits-up. This is often referred to as "hijacking".

One word of advice.. Forget the extra IP's and paying $5/month for each of them. Go grab a cable router like the SMC, Linksys, etc. You'll be happy you did. Everything works pretty much the same way (or can be configured to do so) and you can use an unlimited number of PC's without any extra costs. Plus, you're protected against most hacking from the Internet. No need to mess with static IP's and @home. Of course, they don't "permit" this, but most of us on this board do it anyhow.

- G

 

[PrinceofWands]

Actually I thought about the stolen IP option, but I never receive a conflict warning. Also It's so sporadic that it defies device conflict. And furthermore my Route's and ARP's remained constant rather it was working or not...just seems odd.

As for the extra IP's it's essential. I have 4 personal machines here(mine, my daughters, my roommates, and a laptop), 6 servers (mail&news, ftp/file, Novell, Win2kAdvSrv, Web, game) and a 5 port open switch for Lan games. Two of the four personal machines use dozens of games and applications, each with their own port range usage. Do you have any idea how hard it would be to get all that functioning smoothly with total connectivity behind a simple LinksysBEFSR???

Instead I use one IP for my roommate so he doesn't bitch that some bizarre ancient game of his won't forward through the router, one IP is for me (so I don't bitch about my ancient games not forwarding), and the other is currently in my Linksys to give everything else access - since all the other machines use only very specific services it's easy to assign the port ranges on them.

Of course if anyone has a better idea I'd love to hear about it since I'm still new to this level of networking.

 

[dbwillis]

I saw an app the other day on download.com it was called angry ip. You could set it to scan your range (24.10.67.1 to 24.10.67.255) and see if the numbers you had/have are assigned to someone, it also lists the computer names associated with the IP's