there is one major weakness of hosting a webserver on a dhcp network: your IP address could change at any time.

sometime last night after 10pm my cable modem was given a new IP address. which means anyone trying to get to justinsomnia.org since then would have ended up looking for my site at the old IP address (24.211.162.54) and would have gotten a “site not found error”.

i went home at lunch to figure out why my site was unreachable, discovered what had happened, and updated my zoneedit dns records to reflect the new IP address (24.163.64.42). but because of the global nature of the dns system, the old IP address is probably cached on DNS servers all around the world (which may prevent me from even posting this), so it will be a day or two until the new IP address propagates.

the good news is that i had the same IP address since I set up my server last august. which means i’ve had about 5 months of continuous uptime. the bad news is that i thought my IP address would be more stable than that, considering my internet connection and webserver are always on. maybe roadrunner did some kind of across the board reorganization of their IPs?

all of roadrunner’s phone numbers are busy. ah, customer service. but i got through to their live online chat service and they said my IP address could change every night when the DHCP lease is renewed, even though that is unlikely. and then they went on to remind me that webservers are prohibited in my service agreement. gee thanks.

Tyson: Please be aware that the terms of use for the residential Road Runner service prohibit using any kind of server application. This is outlined under section 5 D of the terms of use agreement which was signed before Road Runner was installed.

If you would like to obtain a copy of this agreement or any other service agreement details, or would like to inquire about service options that will allow the use of servers, we recommend contacting the local office. You may also go to [this] website for related policies.

gotta love ISP’s that don’t understand the spirit of the internet.