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British Telecom IP Addresses

What's up with btinternet.com customers never getting the same darn IP address. Sure makes it tough to ban the occasional idiot in a forum without banning half of the rest of the UK.

Here in the U.S., most people with DSL and cable seem to get the same IP address. Unless they're offline for a week or longer, that is. I've had the same IP address for quite awhile (it changed a few months back when Time Warner re-did their network). BT customers get a new IP address several times per day, it seems.

A user told me they can request - and get - a static IP, but it costs extra. That doesn't help me at all. 😛

5 Responses to "British Telecom IP Addresses"

  1. I run a mail server off my cable modem, so I'm glad that we don't get 15 IP addresses a day - more like a new address every 15 months. Dyndns.org is great, but I'm not sure it would work if the address changed that frequently.

    Also, I use iptables to block access to my SMTP port, but I'm a lot less discriminate than you are with your forum users. For every spam that makes it past my ISP's filters, I check the address at ARIN, and if it isn't a US address, the entire netblock gets blocked. It's not like I associate with anyone internationally (as you do), so there's no great loss.... except to the number of spammers who are successful at reaching my mail server.

    When I started doing that, about 300 spams a day were being processed by my mail server (most of which were then blocked by my ISP). Now that number is "fewer than 20 a day."

  2. Ouch Daniel, I am glad it works but its a little extreme. Also DynDns copes well with changing IP address fairly often. Long ago I used to run my mail server from a BT DSL account and never had a problem receiving mail. (Not that my link was down that often but it did happen). I later swapped to someone that had static IP address available.

    BT are bad like that but then so is T-Com here in Germany, where I now live), every user that uses one of their routers MUST disconnect once a day. When setting up you have 2 options: disconnect when idle or chose an hour period where you are happen to disconnect for 30 odd seconds. Again, you are generally assigned a new IP address everytime you reconnect to their service.

  3. [quote comment="48134"]Ouch Daniel, I am glad it works but its a little extreme.[/quote]
    Oh yeah, I know, it's very extreme. I don't recommend it as a solution for most people, but for me it is easier than reconfiguring my mail server to use the DNSBLs.

  4. I'm get my broadband from BT and last time I checked I had the same IP address for weeks if not months at a time.

    Are the people you are having a problem with still on dial-up?

  5. [quote comment="48179"]Are the people you are having a problem with still on dial-up?[/quote]

    ADSL, supposedly, best I can figure.