On 01/06/13 14:31, mick wrote:
On Sat, 01 Jun 2013 11:00:47 +0100 Anthony Anson tony.anson@girolle.co.uk allegedly wrote:
On 31/05/13 15:23, mick wrote:
This address will vary depending on your method of connection. At home you may have a fixed IP address from your ISP. It is more likely though that you will have a dynamic address allocated from a pool by the ISP. When out and about your public address will be that allocated by the network provider at the time (and may be interfered with by varying levels of proxies).
My ISP tells me (by proxy) that it hasn't allocated me an IP address, and that it will be tacked-on by whatever host/dongle etc I'm connecting through, which is why I have to have a 'roaming connection'.
Anthony
At home (or wherever you use your dongle) your public IP address will be that allocated by your ISP.
My concept of an ISP seems to be out of date then...
For agesandagesandages I was with Zetnet (from about six months after they started, to not long after Breathe hootered them) and connected through a modem to a BT line. This was flaky, more of which later. BT at the time "didn't support the internet" - their words - and wouldn't fix the problem of line-dropping: they said it tested OK for speech. My ISP was Zetnet.The servers which connected me to the internet were in Shetland (later, with the coming of broadband, in Manchester).
When my BT landline finally died completely BT didn't do anything about repairing it, but kept on billing me for rental, which is why I got the dongle. (It died because their grey twin feeder's insulation had become cracked and porous, and where the descending wire looped up to go through the window-frame, the accumulation of water running down it had eaten away the beryllium copper wire inside.)
Where was I?
Oh yes. I had never considered Vodafone to be my ISP: I considered it as a connection to Paston in lieu of a landline, and Paston as my ISP. Paston provides my webspace and holds my domains, so traffic goes via their servers.
This address may be drawn from a small pool of proxy addresses on the ISP's network and will be used to mask your real local IP address which will also have been allocated by your ISP (you say you are using a 3G dongle, not wifi to a local router at home.)
Yes indeed: though it's an old one and charges £15 for 1 GB of data transfer, it has rollover, and £15 lasts me several months. The newer 3 GB ones cost £15/month, and no rollover. I reckon it would take me three months to use 3 gig at the speed this thing runs - I only have a GPRS signal here. So sucks to BT!
When out and about and using a wifi network from another provider (in your case you said that you were using a wifi network in a cafe in Norwich) you will get a public IP address from /that/ provider (and also a real local IP address.)
Hmmmmm.
Prove it to youself with Stuart's suggested test. use curl to get your IP address when connected over a free wifi. Then disconnect and reconnect using your 3G dongle. Now check again. You will have a different IP public address.
I am aware that the current IP address goes with the host pub, café, library, dongle, w.h.y?
You could go further and open a terminal to the shell and check your local IP address in each case (which will have been allocated from a DHCP pool by the provider you are using). Type "ifconfig -a" and look for the second line in each interface description starting "inet addr:" Ignore the local loopback (127.0.0.1) and you will see an address on the form 10.n.n.n or 192.n.n.n or 172.n.n.n. Most typically from a 3G network the address will be of the form 10.n.n.n because the telcos use that large address range on their internal dynamic networks. More typically on a wifi network in a cafe you will see 192.168.n.n because the local wifi router will be configured to hand out addresses from that much smaller pool.
HTH
Helped? Oh yes: I'm going to have a nice lie down.
Actually, thanks, yes, it does tell me that I was being asked the wrong question by support@ - I think - and that things have been moving on all these years while I haven't been paying attention (at the back).
In any case, the unconnectivity hasn't recurred.
yet.
This is what support@ said:
"Tony - You're not with us for your broadband connection, so it's a question that you have to ask your broadband (dongle?) provider"
But Curl told me that...