[TriLUG] A bit about cable.

Mike Helms Mike.Helms at martinmarietta.com
Thu Jun 6 11:24:58 EDT 2002


Hi everyone,

I don't know if I mentioned in my original introduction, but prior to moving
to Raleigh I worked for Shaw Cable (the Western Canadian cable company) for
about a year, in several different capacities.

While I have no insight into the RR service, other than as a user, it would
appear to me that they operate in a similar manner as Shaw.

In the Shaw system, we had a pool of DHCP addresses that were bound to
particular MAC addresses on the network.  So, when your computer makes a
request for an IP address, the DHCP server will assign one, and unless we do
an IP block shift, or you disconnect your connection for a period of time
longer than two or three days, you will keep your same IP address
indefinitely.

IP addresses could be assigned to a modem or a MAC address (in other words,
a static IP), but I generally don't recommend it, as your IP address will
still change if an IP block is moved.  This depended more on geography - in
the year and a half that I had my SOHO service in Calgary, my IP address
only changed once.  We had business customers changing IP addresses every
two months, though, in areas where there werea lot of changes being made to
the network.

My advice to most people running a server under Shaw's radar was to keep the
bandwidth down (under a gig per month), and to just keep an eye on the
dynamic IP. More often than not, these people would keep the same dynamic IP
for just as long as a person with a static on the same router, and the money
saved justified the occasional DNS change.

Cheers,
Michael Helms
Applications Support Analyst
Martin Marietta Materials




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