[BBLISA] comcast ... again

[Carl Alexander]

Um.  I can only assume from this that your friend is renting his 
router from Comcast, rather than using one of his own?  Because
the normal thing for computer-proficient people to do is to
buy a WRT54GL and run their NAT off that.  Which will happily
serve up a /24.  (For that matter, so will an Apple Airport base
station, or any other home router I've seen.  (The limiting of the
DHCP range on his negear NAT may in fact be a built-in limit, but
I'd give long odds that was spec'd by Comcast.)

---Alex

> Because of recent conversations on this list about comcast versus world, I
> feel compelled to tell this story:
> > 
> I have a friend, who is very computer proficient.  He called me up to talk
> about an IP address conflict on his home network.  He told me he has
> comcast, and he has access to login to the comcast router, and the router is
> configured to give out IP addresses via DHCP, and the dynamic range is from
> 192.168.0.10 to 192.168.0.14.  So they only give you 5 IP addresses, and if
> you try to connect a 6th computer, you can't.  You get an IP conflict, and
> somebody gets booted off the network.
> 
> I told him, "Well, why don't you just change the dynamic range?"  He said
> you can't.  He said he spent hours on the phone with comcast, and they told
> him "Call netgear."  I couldn't believe him.  So he initiated a screen
> sharing session, and showed me.  We considered flashing a nonstandard
> firmware onto the comcast router ... which seemed risky ...  I suggested
> maybe looking up the factory reset for the router.  He said he already did
> that, and it just resets to Comcast factory condition.
> 
>  
> 
> He's got a home server, a printer, two laptops, and two desktops.  He can't
> use them all at the same time.  Nevermind, god forbid, he should have
> anything like vonage, or a PDA, or a couple of teenage children with
> computers.
> 
>  
> 
> We concluded there's only one possible solution:  He needs to buy another
> router, and hook the outside of his new router to the inside of the comcast
> router.
> 
>  
> 
> We concluded there is one, and precisely one, possible reason for comcast to
> be stingy with the 192.168.x.x IP addresses.  They're just being d**ks and
> there is no other possible explanation.
> 
>  
> 
> Oh - Get this - While all his other computers and stuff were on, and his
> laptop had an IP conflict which was preventing him from starting his screen
> sharing session ...  I suggested that he just assign himself a static IP
> address, 192.168.0.15.  He did this.  He could ping the gateway.  But he
> could not ping outside the gateway.  So in addition to the dynamic range
> being pathetically small, they also apply a filter to prevent you from using
> any static IP outside of the dynamic range.  D**ks.
>