Stupid Cable Modems. Stupid Comcast

From 4:30am this morning to just about an hour ago, the Internet at the house was down. The cable modem was synched up, and the router, a Netgear WGR614 (4-port 10/100 switch plus 802.11g) had grabbed an IP via DHCP. But, my OS X box, which does DNS for the LAN just was not able to do lookups or get out to the Net. Frustrated, I just left it alone and went to work. Throughout the day, I periodically tried getting to it via ssh, but no luck. No response on port 22.

Came home, dinked around with it, and just finally plugged the modem into the Mac. Voila, the fucker got on the Net, and was able to go everywhere. Plug the modem back into the router, release the IP, renew, and try again. No go- damn thing just keeps getting the same IP assignment. Oh, and get this, it's on a completely different network than what the Mac had gotten.

Finally, I just set the option in the router to use my Mac's MAC address and that fixed the problem. The router just got the same IP and network assignment via DHCP that the Mac had got. But, I wonder, does Comcast now limit who can get on the network, based on MAC? Do they look at the manufacturer bits in the MAC address to determine if one's disallowed? Why was I getting two different network assignments for each device?

As Nicole mentioned, Comcast might have an IP range set aside for abusers or routers. That way, when they ask for your IP, they'll know you've somehow violated their ToS or are using a router. Of course, I'm just conspiracizing here, but ya never know.

Stoopid Comcast.