ISP wants €250 to tell me my IP address

S

sluice44

Registered User
Messages
112
Hah, made you look!!

I've opened a small depot in a NI Enterprise Agency park and we got broadband installed. The Enterprise Agency has sub-contracted the broadband management to a third party IT company.

This IT company have hidden our computers/router behind 'their' firewall and they've given me an 'internal' IP address. I've installed an internet camera because the stock is valuable and the depot is not manned full-time. The camera works fine within the NI office but the IT company won't tell me what my 'external' IP address is.

They've no problem with the internet camera but they want approx €250 to set up a VPN for me. I don't want VPN (€250!); just my 'real' IP address.

Two questions:
1. Is this fair?
2. Is there a 'half-way house' between the current situation and a VPN? I'm open to creative suggestions.
 
Re: Hah, made you look!!

Hah, made you look, too!!

(S'nice the way the vB platform lets you 'mouseover' the titles of posts and read the first 40 characters or so, innit?)

To answer the first part of your question - no, it seems a bit dodgy. Have you read over the T&Cs? If they don't explicitly state that 'a fee will apply' when you ask for information like that, then it seems unfair/unreasonable to charge you for it...

As for the second part, I haven't a clue.

In fact, I'm really just posting this to see what happens - just re-registered...
(and wondering if I've done it right...?)

Dr. M.
 
it sounds like you are using using a shared connection within the enterprise park rather than that they have hidden your ip address which in itself is not unfair unless you are being charged full bt broadband rates.

options
1
use www.logmein.com to remotely control your office machine rfom outside and initiate a msn messenger webcam call.
2
get a website and some webcam software that uploads pics every couple of seconds/minutes which can be viewed from anywhere.

nowadays, a static ip address is not so important and most problems can be overcome
 

NI is 98% broadband-enabled (sigh) so I can probably move to another ISP easily enough.
 
eamonn66 said:
get a website and some webcam software that uploads pics every couple of seconds/minutes which can be viewed from anywhere.
Click to expand...

Good idea & worth exploring. Can you suggest some software? I have a (nothing fancy) personal website, if that's relevant.

However, I thinking of the webcam as more of a monitoring camera. It's software can be set to email me when it's detects motion (I've a blackberry). I get the email, log on to 123.456.78.9:xx, view the camera for a couple of minutes (& record if necessary), and then log off.
 

Perhaps you don't have a fixed IP address at all at the moment - just a non-static dynamically allocated one - and part of the Eur250 is to provide this?

Two questions:
1. Is this fair?
2. Is there a 'half-way house' between the current situation and a VPN? I'm open to creative suggestions.
Click to expand...

Is it fair? As mentioned above it depends on the Ts&Cs of the agreement which you signed up to in the first place I suppose. I remember some proxy service being mentioned which would register your dynamically allocated DSL IP address, allow you to update this whenever it changed and then use a specific domain name to access your LAN remotely but (a) I can't remember the name of the service (b) I'm not sure what, if any, security issues there might be and (c) use of something like this could be on contravention of your existing agreement/acceptable use policy.
 
Perhaps you don't have a fixed IP address at all at the moment - just a non-static dynamically allocated one - and part of the Eur250 is to provide this?
Click to expand...

Eh? I love it when you talk dirty. My router is set up on a fixed IP address. Maybe their server/firewall sees my (internally) fixed IP & says today you shall be (externally) 123.456.78.9.

I think they're just playing 'nanny-state' & blocking ports. I/we have a software anti-virus, software firewall (not MS), & router with firewall. They just don't trust us plebs!
 
Maybe there is some NATing going on and their Firewall is configured to block certain ports and they want the money to free up a port so that there is no hole for unfriendly visitors.

eamonn66's tip with LogMeIn is a good solution, I use that sometimes.

An easy way of seeing what is going is, if you are lucky and you have XP on one of the PC's in the company. Initiate a Remote Assistance session to a PC outside the park and see what IP address is communicated and than try using RemoteAdmin or WinVC to get to it.
 
for webcam software
[broken link removed]

try going to www.whatismyip.com. that will give you the external address that you are using. although without access to the firewall it isnt much good to you.
 
Isn't there a dynamic DNS service that allows you to get a grip on services that
you otherwise wouldn't be able to get to thanks to ever changing IP addresses supplied by the ISP
 
That was the sort of service that I was referring to above but I can't remember any more details about it assuming I didn't dream it up...
 
Thanks for all the replies and suggestions but I spoke to one of their techie guys and got a clearer picture...

Essentially, the IT company own the network and they've leased/allocated 6 fixed IP address to my particular park. One is for email, one for ftp, and one for all the tenants etc. In my scenario, the IT company will block incoming traffic to my camera unless the Enterprise Agency 'give' me one of their static IP addresses (which is unlikely since they've only 6).

Their solution = VPN for €250.

My solution, since they don't block outgoing traffic, is to get the camera to send a picture every 30 seconds to my email account once it's triggered. Not ideal but I'm only looking for a picture of the cat or burgular or whatever set off the camera.
 
sluice44 said:
Essentially, the IT company own the network and they've leased/allocated 6 fixed IP address to my particular park. One is for email, one for ftp, and one for all the tenants etc.
Click to expand...

I don't understand this. Why do they need separate IP addresses for email, FTP etc.? There is no reason why the same IP address cannot be used for many different services differentiated by TCP or UDP port number.

Is there any option for you to get your own broadband service in - e.g. ADSL, SDSL, wireless etc. and thereby have full control over your networking infrastructure if this would work better?
 

edit - vBulletin wants me to add extra characters so 12345678910
 
Fair enough. I appreciate your points about the affordability, reliability and ease of administration (i.e. none) of the shared setup. I also appreciate your points about IBB - have used them on two different sites (one 1:1 512Kbps symmetric and another 6:1 3Mbps ostensibly, but not actually, symmetric) and have not found them as reliable as a leased line or DSL (preferably SDSL) alternative. We are just with them on a short contract until our leased line gets installed.
 
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