"Static" IP...
As a side note to all those that have paid good money for static IPs, my IP did not change for over 8! years from my leased cable modem connection, which uses DHCP. True, when I replaced my router I cloned the old MAC, and if I wanted to change my public IP, a little experiment showed that I could change it at will by changing the MAC and restarting the modem, then reclaim my old IP (I did not wait long enough for the lease to expire) by simply reverting to the old MAC. So my provider was apparently treating their public network more like an internal corporate network than what I would have expected an ISP to do. Not sure if this was due to apathy or just an abundance of IPs to hand out.
My IP finally changed when the cable company changed some of their switchgear to support a higher speed connection for customer nodes. Having only had a couple of different providers since broadband became available, I was wondering how prevalent this is.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
