Static IP....good or bad

[Zak33]

Zen havegiven me a static IP.

Why? Is that good or bad? Relevent or irrelevent? Does it matter? Or is it simply so I could remotely access my PC irrespective of wjether its booted up and down lots.


oh..and while I've got your attention when I switch on 3 PC's on the router, sometimes I get an IP conflict (on my LAN, nowt to do with the statc IP) .

Do i just leave it and let XP sort itself out...or reboot one of them?

I THINK its because my SFF nforce 2 board has power to it from the moment the mains plug is on, whereas the Intel SFF does nowt until its booted up.

SOOO...maybe the mac address from the nforce2 mobo has grabbed the routers attention but not actually booted up, and then the Intel actually boots up and grabs the IP that the mac address on the nforce WAS ognna get!!

Make any sense? Only reason I know how the power ups work is because the KVM switch sharing the 2 PC's ALWAYS sees the nforce. it neverEVER defaults to the Intel and I HAVE TO CHOSE TO SWITCH IT OVER or the rrefresh rate is wrong.

[Moby-Dick]

static ip= good

if all the machines are picking up DHCP then there shouldn't be any conflicts.

[Zak33]

whats DHCP (Dynamic summit summit Protocol?)

they did

some days it works. But somedays it gets caught out.

[Howard]

Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol - Central PC or server device (e.g a router) will assign IP addresses to all the computers on a network to allow them to access the internet and resources

I've got one on my network that gives IPs in the 10.0.0.x range... I'm a bit of a neat freak


Static IPs are good until you feel like some pwnage and get banned from newbie servers in UT as a result

[Spunkey]

Having a Static IP means you can have your own web server

[Twigman]

but without one you still can....

www.dyndns.org

[luap.h]

just means 'they' will always know where you are.....

[DsW]

just means 'they' will always know where you are.....

Yeah. Call me paranoid, but I had a choice of static and dynamic and went for dynamic pretty much for that reason.

[aidanjt]

why would you be paranoid about having a static IP address? thats a bit like being paraoid about the royal mail delivering all your mail to one address.. your home.

static IP addresses are a lot more flexible than dynamic..

[turkster]

You could have a VPN aswell .

[DsW]

why would you be paranoid about having a static IP address? thats a bit like being paraoid about the royal mail delivering all your mail to one address.. your home.

static IP addresses are a lot more flexible than dynamic..

Not quite the same thing. I can't really see the Royal Mail blocking my front door with a targetted DOS attack can you?!

Anyway - in my opinion a dynamic address is fine for what I use my PC for (basically just browsing, downloads, and the occasional online game). I would, however appreciate it if you could list the Pros and Cons of both types of IP address (as you see it).

[scottyman]

I've got a static ip on ADSL - which is much of a muchness, still too hard to remember, so I use a dyndns account with custom dns to map to a hostname that I can remember.
I've got dynamic dns on my cable connection (for my server) and despite being dynamic - the address hasn't changed in almost 2 years.
However - some users are issued new dynamic addresses every day or so (depending on the size of the pool, and how often the lease is assigned for)

if a computer account is still active at lease renewal time (generally 3 days, but I've seen BT do it for as little as 6 hours) it should maintain the same ip address - however if it isn't - then a new address may be issued. if your mate down the road knows your ip address and you're using it to share files - then a short lease time will cause problems.

in general use - it's not an issue.

[Spunkey]

If they really need to find out who you are they will, even if you have a Dynamic IP.
Do you think that your ISP doesnt log what IP your account was using every second of the day?

Anyway, its that old chestnut, dont do anything wrong, dont make people need to find out your IP

[Paul Adams]

Static IP addresses have been preferred for years by a lot of people - back to the days when dial-up connections being limited to a certain amount of time, or unreliable meant you wanted to reconnect and resume where you left off (for file transfers or online gaming for example).

I used Demon as my ISP back in the days before consumer mid-band connections specifically because they gave you your "own" IP address - used in conjunction with ICS and the NTL "50p per connection on a weekend" deal it worked out very nicely

The main benefit is being able to run a service accessible potentially from anywhere with a simple static name resolution - it is important to secure any services that are exposed like this, of course.
VPNs are nice and secure in general, but accepting connections from any source IP with a username of "admin" and a blank password kind of negates it.

It can also be useful if you wish to have security in the opposite direction - if a company has remote users that have static IP addresses then it becomes trivial to add exceptions to the firewall to allow them in, and be able to identify which users are currently on the system with simple netstat or firewall log information.

For my own purposes, I log visits to my website to see browsing trends and like to exclude hits from my own clients which I can do easily with a batch file and qgrep - because I know the IPs.


You do have to wonder why someone (an end-user) would be a target for a DoS attack - typically it is websites that get targetted for this and it's a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack as 1 machine is unlikely to be able to take down a site on its own.

I can only recall IRC users being popular targets for "nukes" (as well as malicious scripts, worms, viruses...) and that was after insulting someone really badly (for example, saying that their choice of favourite film is inferior to your choice of favourite film).

Maybe I've lead a simple, sheltered life and never visit those dark corners of the Internet where ne'er-do-wells lurk and pounce upon the unsuspecting newbie - although I have been working in network security for a few years now and it's not for want of looking

To DoS a machine would require all of your resources to attempt to use up all of theirs (or with a DDoS you use a lot of infected machines to target the individual) so I don't think it is that common - and if the client is firewalled so does not acknowledge the incoming packets then I'm not even sure it would succeed.


If you're a privacy fanatic then you may start to froth at the mouth at the idea of people knowing your address, and prefer a dynamic one - if the mere thought that people know something about you keeps you awake at night.


This was a very long-winded way of saying exactly what Moby-Dick put succinctly: "static IP = good"

[ikkitousen]

yup Paul Adams done it the geek way for us Power to the Geeks

[joshwa]

i've apparently got a 'dynamic' ip address - BUT it's been the same for at least 8 months (haven't really been counting), could be more - but it's dead handy for me, as I do run a webserver (http://joshwaller.tk) and don't have to use dyndns