This is really more idle curiosity than anything else, but I’d like to understand.
Sometimes my IP address will stay the same for days at a time. Other times, it even changes while I’m using it. How can that happen, without interrupting what I’m doing? More importantly, why does it happen??
Your ISP provides you with a dynamic IP address, which has a limited life (“lease”). Mostly it will renew to be the same as it was before, but it does not have to be so. In a dos box do
IPCONFIG /ALL
and you’ll see when your current lease expires.
IP is designed to allow the address to change dynamically while in continuous use. Essentially the devices that need to know about the change get notified of it.
What Askance said. It is odd, however, that your IP would change mid-session. Generally you would only get a new IP after an extended period of not using it. When you renew your lease, DHCP servers usually favor providing the previously provisioned IP and not a new one.
It’s not really that unheard of for IPs to change by the minute, depending on the provider.
With proxy servers, you can even share an IP with other users congruently.
AOL is famous for this.
On the other hand, some ISPs will a lot charge extra for a static IP, though I’ve had the same one via Comcast for over a year.
SHUT UP!
You know what I meant :mad:
Note that IPCONFIG /ALL will indicate the lease(s) of the NIC(s) on the PC.
If the PC is connected directly to the DSL “modem” then, and only then, will IPCONFIG /ALL tell you anything about the DSL connection itself. And even then only if the DSL modem doesn’t include any router / firewall / connection sharing features.
In many home and virtually all SOHO or larger-scale ofices, the results of IPCONFIG /ALL will be for the link(s) between the PC and the local firewall or router.
To see the IP address provided by the ISP, you would need to make an equivalent query on the first box on the wire this side of the DSL “modem”. That may be a router, it may be a proxy server, it may be nearly anything. Whatever it is, it almost certainly won’t respond to typing “IPCONFIG /ALL”.
Getting my current IP address is easy. My provider has a screen with connection information, and a button to restart the modem. Sometimes if I restart, it changes IP addresses, but I only need to do that about every blue moon (I think maybe 4 times in 10 months).
The screen also gives me the gateway ID and both DNS IDs.
I understand the benefits to changing the IP every so often, but it’s the mid-session changes that really prompted me to ask. I can recall a couple of (longish) sessions where it changed twice (that I knew about). As I had said, sometimes it stays the same for days on end (ISTR as much as two weeks), even though I don’t leave my computer on. That part didn’t seem as weird as the mid-session changes; those aroused my curiosity. Before I got DSL, I had been under the impression that my IP would change any time I turned my computer off.
If you’re wondering why I even know about it (much less care), there’s one online activity I have where I keep track of what my IP is. Before I started doing that, I neither knew or cared what my IP was at any given time, just that it was up.
I’m also aware that some scammers check IP assignments to financial sites, so they can spoof them as soon as they expire (a good reason never to use the machine address going to a site unless you know it’s static). No, I don’t think anybody would want to spoof my ID. 
It’s just that all of this is alien territory, as it were, and I’m one of those whose curiosity can get stoked on that kind of thing.
SBC is famous for doing this as well, as is South Korea’s telecom provider. Vonage will not work in SK for that reason. Oh, I have no doubt it will work for 5 minutes, but good luck making the call.
If you are ever interested in reaping the benefits of a fixed IP address, while limited to dynamic IP addresses, you can go to dyndns.com. You can get a free domain name from them (e.g. myhome.dyndns.com) that will always map to your home IP address.
They do it by providing special software that you can run to update their records whenever your dynamic IP address changes.
Better still, some routers (like my Linksys router) have the “update dyndns” functionality built right into their firmware.
Of course, I have not yet seen a list of Terms of Service that does not explicitly state that you may not run any kind of server. I suppose that that is one of those blatently-abused rules that is only enforced when someone is a jerk, though I have never tried running a server on my own machine. Maybe they scan for those things and send nastygrams to the offenders on a daily basis.
Wow. Thanks. I’m not sure I’ll ever have occasion to even want to do this, but it’s always nice to know about things like this. Not sure what it says about me, that liking to collect bits of knowledge that have no immediate or obvious utility, but maybe it’s just another indicator of my problem with throwing things away.
:smack: 
Idle curiosity: What instrument do you play, that you should (apparently) like G flat minor 7[sup]th[/sup]? Or is meant to convey that you’re complicated? 
Jazz guitar.
You were sooooo close…
Start with your garden-variety C chord (C-E-G)
Now flatten the E (C-Eb-G) and you get “C minor”
Now toss in the dominent 7th for some tension (C-Eb-G-Bb) and you get “C minor 7th”
Now flat the 5 (C-Eb-Gb-Bb) and you get “C minor 7 flat 5”, or “C half diminished”
It’s a nice jazz chord that often shows up in progressions in minor keys 
.
:o
Oh, well. With tablature, do you assume that everything starts in C (or don’t you use tablature)? Of course, you do with “regular” scoring, but I just couldn’t quite figure out an alternative. And hadn’t a clue about instruments. Or are you another “by ear” musician?
[SIZE=2]“Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.” (Ludwig Van Beethoven)[/SIZE]