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What’s in an IP Address?
May 30, 1999

Different DSL ISP’s provide IP addresses based on their policies and practices. It is really a decision that each individual ISP makes in how they want to offer customer services. There are two basic ways you can learn about what kind of an IP address is provided by your ISP: Either they are going to provide a dynamic IP address or a static IP address.

Let me go back a step and explain what an IP address is for those of you who may not know. An IP address stands for Internet Protocol. That is the IP part of the TCP/IP protocol used for computers to communicate on the Internet. Each computer or node on the Internet needs to have an IP address in order for everyone else on the Internet to know where it is, where to send messages to and where messages are coming from. It doesn’t matter whether the message is an e-mail, web site, computer file or just a network transmission. An IP address is critical to the running and operation of the Internet.

Whether you need a dynamic or statis IP address can help you find the best kind of ISP for your high speed DSL or broadband service. Let’s take something that you are probably familiar with, which is dial-up phone access. When your computer dials out on your modem and connects to a modem at your ISP service. The ISP’s modem is assigned to a device called a terminal server. This connection, called a port, is some physical connection or logical connection that is made by each individual dial-up user connecting. When you disconnect you lose that port or IP address that you had at the time. When you reconnect you may get an entirely different IP address. Not a problem, really, for people who just want to browse the Internet. That’s why dynamic IP addressing is used for those types of services.

Many cable companies that provide cable modems provide dynamic IP addresses as well, using a protocol known as DHCP (or Dynamic Host Control Protocol). This means, simply, that a block or range of IP addresses, say 20, 100, 1000, it doesn’t really matter how many, are held and managed by a system. When you connect your computer into the network you are assigned a dynamic IP address for the time your session is running.

I’ve read that some DSL telephone company internet services will provide a dynamic IP address but they only guarantee that your IP address will be assigned for a session. A session is a specific time period that the ISP determines and is limited to somewhere from four to eight hours. This is very important because it makes the operation easier for the ISP to use dynamic IP addressing. They don’t have to worry about what IP address each individual customer is using, they just have a block of them and whenever people are connected they get an IP address. You might hold on to that IP address for quite some time, depending on how the ISP has implemented the DHCP protocol.

As I mentioned, this is all really very good for someone who basically simply wants to browse the Internet, has their e-mail account set up with their DSL or cable provider and doesn’t really require the use of any other services beyond that.

A static IP address is generally better for the individual who might wants to set up a LAN, either in their home or small business, or run some additional services off of the computers they have connected on their DSL connection. Many users may want to run and operate their own web site on a web server of their own, support their own e-mail on multiple computers in an office environment or running a file server across multiple offices. This is where static IP addresses start to make more sense.

There is another solution called a proxy server that I’ll talk about in just a few minutes. With the static IP addresses, each computer that is connected to the network actually has it’s own individual IP address. This is an advantage from a standpoint of making it easy to set up and manage a home-based or small business LAN. Your DSL service provider would provide you with IP addresses, either individually for sale on a monthly basis. They are usually very inexpensive, somewhere between $2.00 and $5.00 a month seems to be the going rate for DSL services. You then have several IP addresses that you can assign to your computers and other network devices so that you now have the ability to assign each individual computer.

The set up process is fairly easy if you are using Microsoft, MAC O/S, or any other operating system software to assign a permanent IP address to that computer. Each computer in the network can then see each other, you can share files with each computer. In addition, there are "network devices" such as a networked printer that can be assigned an ip address and you can also implement technologies where you might have a router routing your entire LAN out to the Internet off of your permanent DSL connection.

Another alternative to use, as I mentioned earlier, is the proxy service. A proxy server essentially acts as a translator. It gets assigned one IP address as a permanent IP address and behind the proxy server on one side you have your connection out to the Internet and the Internet recognizes that static IP address, looks for it and understands that it belongs to that proxy server.

On the other side of the proxy server you have your home or small business LAN and you might have an entirely different set of IP addresses that are transparent and that the public Internet cannot actually see.

This is actually one of the steps that people start to use to implement firewall security as well, but it is not really a firewall, it is simply functioning as a proxy server where those permanent IP addresses are transparent and cannot be seen by the rest of the Internet. By using a proxy server you obviously have to have additional software and you have to understand how to set up and operate and run a proxy server. Generally, a network professional, a Microsoft certified engineer or Novell LAN tech engineer can implement these technologies but a good hobbyist can accomplish it as well. For the average home user, however, the time and effort required to manage and understand how to set up a proxy server might not make it worth it.

If you are using a router, you have another option. Some routers do something called NAT or Network Address Translation. The router is assigned one IP Address and you can assign any IP addresses to devices on your LAN while the router does the "translation" of converting all traffic your LAN send out to the Internet to the one IP address it has.

So, you have several choices as I mentioned, in IP addresses. Dynamic IP addresses, where the IP address depends on the particular session that you’re running with you ISP. Or static IP address where you actually end up with permanent IP addresses assigned for each individual computer or device in your network and LAN environment. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. For people who are interested in running LANs for their small business, generally the traditional way has been to get ranges of IP address from their ISP provider to assign to individual computers in their environment so they can manage them and move them around effectively without too much difficulty.

Since this is my first attempt at writing a regular newsletter, I apoligize to all my readers for the lack of getting a regular issue out. This months issue was to go out in mid-May. I have written the next issues draft so you should see it in mid-June.

copyright 1999 MM Internet, Inc.

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