I had the same IP as someone else?
Community Forums/General Help/I had the same IP as someone else?
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| so I was at a hotel about to tap into their free internet service. I clicked connect to network and ding an error popped up saying something about me having the same IP as someone else on the network... now what are the chances of that? 1 in 1,000,000? The problem isnt relevant anymore as I am now home but I was just wondering if anyone has had this happened or knows what to do in that situation. |
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| now what are the chances of that? 1 in 1,000,000? The chances are actually pretty big: Depending on the size of the hotel, they may have multiple access points. If they aren't configured properly, they may be handing out overlapping IP addresses causing collisions. Probably more likely: someone connected with their business laptop, and instead of getting a DHCP address, it was still configured for a static IP address that happened to be in the same local area network block as the hotel was using (very likely, since the vast majority of local networks either use the 10.0.0.x range, or 192.168.1.x) If the laptop is using an address in the same range it will work -- but the hotels DHCP service will be unaware of it, which means that it will happily hand out the same address to someone else. (DHCP keeps track internally of which addresses have been handed out, but if you configure an IP manually it won't know about it) Now, normally windows should detect an IP conflict and ask the DHCP server for a different one, and things should work themselves out fairly quickly... But bottomline: it is actually a very common occurance. |
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| oh ok that makes sense I was thinking it gave you a random ip where all of the numbers were different or something. I guess i know next to nothing about networking |
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| I was thinking it gave you a random ip where all of the numbers were different or something. I guess i know next to nothing about networking There are 2^32 = 4.2 billion possible IP addresses... But only a very small subset of that is reserved for local area networks, like you'd use in an office, hotel, or home network. |
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| There are 2^32 = 4.2 billion possible IP addresses Not if you count IPv6. Not widely used yet, though. |
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| Not if you count IPv6. Not widely used yet, though. So they're finally working on a new IP system? Thank god; when the population of the world is over 6.5 billion, even 4.2 billion doesn't go very far. O_o |
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| Working on it? It's been present in lots of products for some time: vista, server 2003/2008 |
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| So they're finally working on a new IP system? Thank god; when the population of the world is over 6.5 billion, even 4.2 billion doesn't go very far. O_o It's been around for years, but uptake has been very, very slow... It's one of those chicken-and-the-egg things: Everyone would benefit if everyone switched over, but there is very little to gain by being first... So everyone is waiting for everyone else to switch over first. The 4.2billion limit is somewhat mitigated by the fact that you can share a single IP with many users through NAT (Network Address Translation), although that does reduce its functionality somewhat (if your ISP runs you behind a NAT firewall, you can't run services for example) Most likely East Asia will lead the push towards IPv6 because the issue is much more immediate for them: they are rapidly running out of address space. The country of China, for example, has less IP addresses assigned to them than MIT alone owns. (MIT has a full class A, which is 16,777,216 addresses. There are a bunch of other large US corporations as well that own similar blocks -- some of the large telcos actually have more than one thanks to mergers over the years) We'll probably all end up with IPv6 in the end, but it will be many more years before it will be common in the western world. (If you've never seen an IPv6 address: they can be a bit of a hassle to work with. A 'normal' IPv4 address looks something like this: 10.34.56.178, while an IPv6 address would look like this: 3ffe:1900:4545:3:200:f8ff:fe21:67cf |
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| >I had the same IP as someone else? Yes, 127.0.0.1 |
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