On 9 Apr 2007 at 5:40, chipo chika wrote:

> My IP address is dynamic. What does this mean? 

  A dynamic address is one of a pool belonging to the ISP that are issued to 
customers more or less at random, as needed.  From the point of view of the 
ISP, this is good, because it means that they only need as many addresses as 
clients who can be online at one time; they may have more customers than 
that.
  From the point of view of clients, it's a mixed blessing.  If you have a 
portable machine, which may connect via different locations (and perhaps 
even different networks/ISPs), it's convenient to let it just obtain an 
address each time from whatever network it's on.
  But if you want a machine to act as a *server*, reachable by clients 
scattered around the Internet, then it's much simpler to find a machine 
whose address is static (doesn't change).

  P2P systems generally include a provision for each client to register its 
current address into the P2P system each time it connects, so whether the 
client address is static or dynamic shouldn't matter.

  BUT

  If your client computer is behind your own router doing NAT (Network 
Address Translation), then the above applies to whether your *router* uses a 
static or dynamic address to talk to your ISP.  Depending on how the P2P 
code works, you *might* need to be able to accept inbound connections, which 
will require your router to have a configured "port forward" of outside 
traffic to your client machine's *local* address.  It will be very hard to 
configure that if the client has a dynamic address assigned by the router!

  MOST P2P systems don't require this, but some do, and BitTorrent may be 
one of them.

David Gillett

                Curious about the people moderating your
                   messages? Visit our staff web site:
                    http://freepctech.com/staff.shtml