I’ve recently found a necessity to change my IP address. I have a cable modem and use Comcast Xfinity, but from what I’ve read on their customer support forums, it’s an absolute nightmare to get one’s IP address changed, and it has to do with changing the MAC address.
I’m a technophobe of the highest degree (heck, just posting this is starting to ramp up my anxiety), so, can anyone give me advice / walk me through how to do this?
(The reason I want to change the IP- There’s a website I frequent that, for whatever reason, has some content blocked to a range of IP numbers which I’m in. I’ve talked to the moderator, and he’s tried to tinker with things to no avail. He suggested I talk to Comcast, which, after reading the unfavorable forum reports, made me think of asking here first.)
There’s a MAC address is built into your ethernet card. There is no standard for how it is stored. Some of them are on eprom chips that you don’t have access to. Some of them are stored in flash memory that you can easily change by going into your network settings. Exactly how to change it (if you can change it) varies from one manufacturer to the next.
I am assuming though that Comcast assigns your IP based on your cable modem’s MAC address and not your PC’s MAC address. Again, there’s no standard for how the MAC address is stored on your cable modem. You might be able to change it from the cable modem’s configuration screen (usually accessible via logging into the cable modem) but then again you might not. Also, I believe that changing its MAC address will make Comcast’s system think that it’s not a valid customer cable modem and Comcast will refuse to allow it to talk on their system. I know that when I had to change out my cable modem I had to go through this long procedure on the phone with Comcast to get them to recognize it and allow it to work.
This is likely to be a dead end, especially for a non-expert. MAC addresses (nothing to do with the Apple product) are unique addresses built into each piece of Ethernet hardware at the factory. Some routers give you the ability to “fake” it by typing one in (usually for ISPs that don’t let you use routers – you tell the router that it has the same MAC address as the single device they let you use.), but not all routers have that feature. If yours does, try changing some digit in it while you’re not connected to the network, then reconnect.
IP addresses are the real “addresses” of the internet, and they’re almost completely independent of the MAC address; one should have no real effect on the other, except that sometimes the MAC address is used as an informal DHCP client ID (i.e. for dynamically-assigned IP addresses, the server will “remember” the IP address last assigned to a given MAC address and give it back if it’s still available) – I guess that’s what’s happening here.
But this is all going to be pointless in the long run because (a) the addresses available to the ISP for your area are likely all in a small range anyway, and (b), even if you get a “good one”, you won’t be able to keep it – it’ll eventually be replaced by a different one. This is NOT an ISP problem, nor is it on your end, the site administrator is the only one who can reliably fix it.
(As a side comment, banning whole ranges of IP’s from a major dynamic address provider like Comcast is beyond stupid unless you’re willing to accept large collateral damage. IP range banning is meant for things like cutting off foreign IP ranges from countries that produce almost entirely spam and malware during attacks, not as a huge hammer for banning one or two users.)
The actual solution to your problem is you need to use a proxy. There are free web-page style proxies, and more expensive proxies that let you connect through a VPN to someone else’s internet connection, with all ports forwarded.
Either way, this will allow you to change the IP that the website sees to a completely different one.
Do a Google search for free VPN. If your problem is just with one site (or even a few) that you need to access occasionally, a free VPN service should be quite adequate to your needs. In my experience a VPN (it stands for Virtual Private Network) is not hard to install or use, although it will probably involve downloading a program and installing it on your computer. A free service is likely to be time limited, but if you use it just for accessing the site or sites you are having problems with you should be fine.
When you access the site in question, it will not see your IP address at all, but the one the VPN supplies. I suppose it is possible that some sites will block certain VPN IP addresses, but if that occurs, just try another free VPN. There are quite a few of them.
I very much doubt that your machine’s MAC address has anything to do with your problem.
You might want, also to google free VPN reviews before you decide which one to go with.
But if you use a VPN, you are just using the IP address of that VPN server. And the free VPN services (or even paid ones) are constantly abused by people who use them to access web sites they are banned from. As a result, most of those VPN server IP addresses are already banned from a lot of web sites.
The OP really should get the forum operator to fix the problem.
Comcast assigns you an IP address from a pool they maintain. If your old IP is on the block list, it’s a virtual certainty that all Comcast IPs from your area are on the same block list. (Nobody blocks a single address.)
The real problem here is the forum owner blocking based on IP-- that’s a terrible way of doing things. Comcast isn’t doing anything wrong, and neither are you. The forum owner, having your email, knows there’s a legitimate user at that IP address and knows his IP block is wrong. He needs to stop being lazy and fix the problem.