Sonic.net pool of rotating IPs and anonymity

Internet access discussion, including Fusion, IP Broadband, and Gigabit Fiber!
14 posts Page 2 of 2
by thulsa_doom » Wed Feb 15, 2012 8:12 pm
bill wrote:But I'm wondering if, as someone who isn't interested in changing your IP, you might be unaware of how frequently they actually are changing for some Sonic users.
As somebody who routinely fields network abuse complaints for Sonic.net, I'm quite aware of how frequently our customers tend to switch up their IPs. Rarely. Before we revised our log retention policies, I would see lease histories that generally spanned back however long a customer's device had been on our network be it days, weeks, or months. All with the same IP.

If every customer were to yank the power cords that feed their computers, routers, and modems at 11pm tonight and did not plug them back in again until 11am tomorrow, the vast majority of them would request the same IP addresses they had when they lost power. As they wouldn't have been taken by other users in the meantime, all of these addresses would be available and our server would happily comply with their explicit requests to get their old addresses back.

There is some amount of churn, to be sure. People introduce new devices onto the network, which are given unused leases, which cause IPs that were previously used to become unavailable. This can cascade a bit, but tends to settle right back down.

Oddly, the easiest way I know of to get a fresh IP, as most devices don't have a setting for "do not DHCPREQUEST for last-held IP," is to tell your device to change its MAC address while it's still holding a valid lease. That will cause our server to refuse to give you that same IP, which will prompt your device to issue a DHCPDISCOVER again. The root problem here is a combination of our not using PPPoE (at this point asking our existing DHCP-based customers to switch over to PPPoE would be quite an undertaking) and the default behavior of most customer-owned DHCP clients.

There are utilities out there with names like DHCP IP Forcer that are supposed to provide an automated workaround, but I seriously distrust anybody that's trying to peddle Rapidshare wait-circumvention tools and such; they just smell of malware to me. Maybe I'm just jaded.

Regarding the size of the IP pools, it wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that two people with similar IPs are geographically near each other, whether it's us, AT&T, Comcast, or any other provider. If the person on 70.134.10.5 is in the South Bay, the person on 70.134.10.7 probably isn't in New Jersey. It's certainly possible to set up a network that way, but most network operators wouldn't find it practical.

All said, I think VPN and proxies are both more convenient and less shady and more practical than the alternative. There's very little reason why you can't be a Swedish IP to the outside world, especially when such things can be set up to run on boot.
John Fitzgerald
Sonic Technical Support
by bill » Fri Feb 17, 2012 1:44 am
dane wrote:
bill wrote:There should be two distinct products you can chose -- the actually static one or the actually rotating one. Quasi-rotating is pointless and the worst of both worlds.
We concur. As a general principal, making dynamic IPs more dynamic is a goal. Today the DHCP is managed in the POP, by the Cisco equipment there. It has no knobs to turn, and simply does DHCP in the standard way, which results in little churn.

We are working on a new redundant and distributed DHCP server deployment. This will give us the possibility of doing custom development in order to create a more "dynamic" dynamic behavior.
Terrrific.

You should definitely get a new IP whenever your modem reconnects, or if you send a manual "renew lease" command. It would also be good to automatically change everyone's IP every 24 hours (tracking protection) or even more frequently (hacking protection) -- if you can detect that they aren't streaming something at that moment.

Fusion is an brilliant product. I'm really looking forward to signing up at some point.

Guest wrote:
bill wrote:Thanks Dane. Like proxies, VPN is too involved to bother with for normal daily Web use.
If you're invested in privacy, you might want to give it another look. I was super easy to set up on Mac OS X. Added benefit, it also works from wireless cafes, so I have a secure connection all the time.
I'll look into it further. Does sound very interesting for public hotspots for security in any case. Thanks.

thulsa_doom wrote:
bill wrote:But I'm wondering if, as someone who isn't interested in changing your IP, you might be unaware of how frequently they actually are changing for some Sonic users.
As somebody who routinely fields network abuse complaints for Sonic.net, I'm quite aware of how frequently our customers tend to switch up their IPs. Rarely.

[...]

Oddly, the easiest way I know of to get a fresh IP, as most devices don't have a setting for "do not DHCPREQUEST for last-held IP," is to tell your device to change its MAC address while it's still holding a valid lease. That will cause our server to refuse to give you that same IP, which will prompt your device to issue a DHCPDISCOVER again. The root problem here is a combination of our not using PPPoE (at this point asking our existing DHCP-based customers to switch over to PPPoE would be quite an undertaking) and the default behavior of most customer-owned DHCP clients.
Yeah I've been reading up on IPoE/DHCP DSL and see the technical issue there. The MAC address suggestion is a good trick to know. Thanks.
by blood_donor » Thu May 10, 2012 4:45 pm
How do you change the MAC address on a ZTE ZXV10 modem? I can't find it in the browser interface.

Thanks,
Don
by thulsa_doom » Fri May 11, 2012 3:25 pm
blood_donor wrote:How do you change the MAC address on a ZTE ZXV10 modem? I can't find it in the browser interface.
I'm unaware of a means of configuring the w300 to present a false MAC address. Switch it to bridged and the MAC address provided by whatever's behind the ZTE will be the one presented to our DHCP server:

Log into the modem's interface at 192.168.1.1
Enter "admin" for username and password
Make sure that PVC1 is selected
Go to Interface Setup
Under ISP set "Bridge Mode"
Click Save
Click LAN
Change DHCP to "Disabled"
Click Save
John Fitzgerald
Sonic Technical Support
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