Comments on: RIAA student attack foiled

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:44:36 +0000

This is why once every month I manually change all static IP’s on my companies network. It first protects privacy and second helps me clean up any junk devices on the network.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 04:31:37 +0000

Basically you’re right. The uni sounds like it’s using a DHCP server which hands out IP addresses to the pcs when they start up. After a preset period of time with no traffic from that IP, the server puts that IP back in the pool of available IP’s, at the end of the list.

Each time a pc starts the DHCP server assigns it the first free IP address. Since the pc’s are never started and shut down in exactly the same order every day, they’re almost never going to get the same IP 2 days running. Also the list of available IP’s is sorted in time/date order, the first one that was freed up is the first one that gets handed out. It’s not numeric order or anything like that.

The only reason i know this is because it’s how my ISP does it. I’m frankly astounded that unis or American isp’s would use static IP’s at all. It’s bad enough keeping track of what device has what IP with only 200 or so pc’s and some printers to deal with, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands of customers pc’s.

By: Reader's Write

Reader's Write — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:43:31 +0000

This is unusual. How would a network be able to detect when a computer is turned off? I suppose it could detect when it stops receiving pings from the specific computer based on its MAC address, and then change the IP address when it detects pings again, but I don’t otherwise see how this would be possible.