Changing Static IP addresses in Cable Modem

I thought they stopped doing that about a decade ago. I wonder if his bill offers any clues.

The latter is more or less correct. I'm on Comcast and getting a different IP address is as easy as changing my router's WAN MAC address and then rebooting everything, in order. I suspect TWC is the same.

I think he's had the same plan for 10+ years and renews it without a second thought. He's probably getting royally screwed.

But that's with a supposedly dynamic IP assignment, right? TWC supposedly told him that his modem is configured to use certain IP addresses.

It's Kansas City, if that matters.

-sw

Yes, that's with a dynamic IP address. If he truly has multiple static IP's assigned, I suppose he could connect a device, such as a spare router, to suck one of them up, then connect his actual gateway router to pick up the second IP. Once the binding is in place, I'd expect it to stick. That's messy, though. If it were me, I'd be calling to cancel the static assignments, all 4 of them.

Curious: do you still use UUCP, and if so, under what situations is it better than IP?

Chris

What's the maker and muddle number of the cable modem? Most Rotomola cable modems can be configured by aiming a web browser at

192.168.100.1 and tinkering with the WAN/internet settings. If the modem is setup for a static IP address, he should be able to change it there.

Are you sure about that? I've never seen a cable modem (plain cable modem, not a combo modem-router) that allowed ANY configuration from the LAN side. You can look, but you can't change anything.

Unfortunately, that's true. All provisioning is done via DHCP from the CMTS.

I was hoping that the unspecified cable modem might have been an exception. For the businesses that want a static IP address from Comcast, the DHCP server has a pre-assigned IP-MAC address pair, where a specific MAC address always gets the same IP address. If that's the way TWC works, then the IP address change will need to be done by TWC.

Of course, this begs the question why someone would want to change their IP address.

I still use UUCP. It's running on 486DX2/66 with SCO Unix 3.2v4.2. It has been up in more or less its present form since about 1988. I've been waiting for the machine to die so I can replace it with something modern, but as long as it works, there's no incentive. It's the 2nd machine from the right:

UUCP is much slower and much less efficient than POP3/SMTP/IMAP4 and should not be used unless you have a good reason.

Incidentally, the entire operating system, with the C compiler and all the log files, applications, and junk, only occupies about 200MBytes of disk space and is running on 8 MBytes of RAM. Who needs gigahertz, gigabytes, gigabucks, and gigabloat?

Uptime isn't so great because the battery in the UPS is almost dead. It's usually many months and only needs a reboot when someone sends me a monster attachment, or when I need to move things around the office.

I ran a UUCP mail server on 486/66 Unixware for a long time, and never converted to "on the web". It was the feed in and out for about 60 people on the company LAN. The email uploads/downloads didn't clog up our "internet" access, which was originally a shared dialup thingie, and later DSL. A side effect of having the server in house was that people thought our email was "really fast", essentially spooling locally at LAN speed, then dribbling out to the internet at 9600 baud.

When I first connected via DSL, it automatically started sending SMTP instead of UUCP, immediately resulting in bounced messages because we were in a blacklisted "dialup" address pool, so I configured it to continue UUCP, and ignore the internet connection.

Nah. UUCP was in a former life. Although I wouldn't hesitate to use UUCP with uux over TCP if the need arose. mainly because I don't know what the modern equivalent mechanisms are :-)

-sw

I certainly recognize the Open Desktop sticker.

For sure. But I would use it for file transfers coupled with UUX. We had banks of 304 modems per location that talked for 20 hours a day. I don't care what anyone says, consistently reliable POTS modems never existed. Hayes, Multi-tech, Telebit, Ventel, PPI - I was constantly banging on all of them.

-sw

Yeah, I told him to try that out (but I didn't know the IP address), as well as changing the MAC address of the router - if that option is available on his Tenda(?) router.

Thanks.

-sw