>When your router receives a non-static DHCP assigned IP address from your ISP there is a pre-defined time limit built into the assignment, this time limit is called a DHCP Lease. The typical lease time for ISP’s in the United States is roughly 7 days. However in most instances your router will renegotiate this lease prior to its expiration. During the lease renegotiation, it is very common for the same IP to be reassigned to your router. In fact our research has discovered many homes that have theoretically dynamic IP’s, but have held the same IP for multiple years. Because of this recursive reassignment the typical location targeted by El Toro has held the same IP address for 7 months.
It seems a typical location has the same ip address for around 7 months and can indeed have the same address for far longer if your service isn't interrupted, you don't change or reboot networking hardware, and you don't try to connect to the game from your laptop at your friends house.
My current ISP in the UK and my previous one in France are changing IPs every few weeks or so in practice, or when the box is rebooted, or when the connection is lost for a while between the box and the ISP.
The game server would prevent many (most?) players by whitelisting IPs, but I bet they couldn't care less about blocking players or they wouldn't require whitelisting in the first place.
I assume you can't log in using a user/pass in that server, that's why they use IP addresses. But you could have a web interface where you can log in, and that would communicate with the game server to add your current IP to the whitelist.
I've had the same v4 address with ATT for over a year. It's technically possible for a dhcp server to deny a renew and have the client initiate a discover to be given a different IP but in practice that would break everyone's active connections each time so ISPs just let DHCP renew until you stop asking.
For something with the user population of a community game server you could also allow the full subnet and probably never run into a user collision.
Would be cool to just accept a DNS instead. Servers could poll it at a fixed interval to update whitelists and clients can run a DNS updater, i.e no-ip.
michaelmrose|6 years ago
https://www.eltoro.com/how-long-does-an-ip-address-stay-atta...
It seems a typical location has the same ip address for around 7 months and can indeed have the same address for far longer if your service isn't interrupted, you don't change or reboot networking hardware, and you don't try to connect to the game from your laptop at your friends house.
user5994461|6 years ago
My current ISP in the UK and my previous one in France are changing IPs every few weeks or so in practice, or when the box is rebooted, or when the connection is lost for a while between the box and the ISP.
The game server would prevent many (most?) players by whitelisting IPs, but I bet they couldn't care less about blocking players or they wouldn't require whitelisting in the first place.
zttxz|6 years ago
zamadatix|6 years ago
For something with the user population of a community game server you could also allow the full subnet and probably never run into a user collision.
yellow_lead|6 years ago