Several months ago, my small time cable provider was purchased by a larger provider. Two months later, my website on Apache2 broke for internet access (but not for LAN), while everything else about internet remained and remains working normally.

I found that my provider, https://whatismyipaddress.com/ and speedtest-cli all report my IP address as 24.50.w.x (which has changed #x only 2 times in intervening months, much more often than the 6-24 months I've experienced over the past two decades with Spectrum and its predecessors).

However since the web site break, the web page for setting up my router has reported a very different WAN address (obtained via DHCP): 100.73.y.z. I've discussed the problem with various employees for tech support of my provider, none of whom have explained what is happening. One tech suggested I needed to commit to paying an extra monthly fee to lock down my WAN IP. Another said something about some kind of bridging required on their part needed to be done, but doing it didn't change anything.

I fail to see how either of these things could explain the difference between my router's report and the others. Several router reboots haven't helped. Switching modems hasn't helped.

What could be going on? How can I get the different WAN IPs reconciled so my web site can be running again?

(I'm using one of my two own cable modems to save the $9.99USD monthly rent charged.)

100.73.y.z is Shared Address Space (100.64.0.0/10), that means it is not routable over the internet, it only works behind NAT. There may be multiple devices in the world with the same IP. You can reach outside because of NAT. The outside translated address is 24.50.w.x, but again, that is shared by all devices within your ISP's network. This essentially means you cannot run servers of any kind.

Since IPv4 address space is exhausted many ISP contracts do not guarantee home users a unique IP. To get that you need to be a business customer.

Thanks for responding!

Where is the address my router reports coming from? IOW, what is its source? I get what NAT does, and the IPV4 address shortage, but I thought that was something my router was doing, not the ISP, so I'm still confused about where in the chain between google.com and the PC I'm typing this from this aliasing is injected. It seems the router's reported 100 number is coming from closer to me than the 24 number. Is the 100 number the one my cable modem actually sees, and thus the router?

I read somewhere when this first happened that there are non-zero cost workarounds. I've been trying to exhaust all non-free options before going that route. I need to be sure I wasn't dealing with novices answering tech support lines. Searching results have not been helping.

When I had Spectrum this was never a problem. Possibly this was because Spectrum was not my ISP. Spectrum billed me, but my service was with Earthlink, since long before Spectrum replaced Bright House replaced Time Warner replaced....

One tech did offer a fixed IP, for a monthly fee, yet another price increase above my ISP's rate prior to its buyout.

Next time I won't buy a house where the exclusive cable provider has a name I've never heard of before. Apparently bigger is better sometimes. :P

The public IP is coming from your ISP's "edge" router where they send public outbound traffic.

You're being "Double NATed", your router is being assigned an IP in the ISP's private address space and then they are routing your outbound traffic over another NATting router to the public internet.

There's (generally) no problem in doing this and some would consider it safer as there's now the ISP's NATting in front of your router.

As was previously mentioned, IPv4 space is exhausted and it makes much more sense for ISPs to employ this kind of topology rather than having a public IPv4 address for 99% of their customers who wouldn't have an inbound traffic requirement.

I am running an Apache web server on a desktop machine running Trisquel 8 (based on Ubuntu). I would like to make the server accessible to other machines/devices on my local network, but I can't figure out how.

When I try to connect from another device, using the local IP address of the Apache server, I get error messages in the browser, such as: in Firefox on a Mac, I get 'Unable to connect. Firefox can't establish a connection to the server at localhost.'. If I try to connect using the DuckDuckGo browser on an Android phone, I get 'Webpage not available.


www.krogerfeedback.com

It is possible to run the Apache web server on a desktop machine. This allows for more control over the server, as well as the ability to customize it to suit the needs of the user. Installing Apache on a machine running a Windows operating system requires downloading the software from the official Apache website and following the instructions provided on the site. Once installed, the software must be configured for the user's network and the content that it will host.

First Osinski, the ip is the ip of the server, not localhost (for machines in your local network). You can see it via ifconfig. You seem to understand spoofing (editting hosts file) so the entry should be in /etc/hosts or windows hosts "MYIP MYSERVER" so if I want to connect to a server called myserver.mydomain.com at the ip 10.0.0.2 it would be "10.0.0.2 myserver.mydomain.com" entry. Both windows and Linux generally consult a hosts file before consulting dns or other services.

MrMazda, there is a big difference outbound vrs. inbound connects. Outbound, the NAT records the temp connect so it knows where the origin is. That can support as many NATs as it needs, because each level is separate (your router, your isp) Inbound, it can't work. It doesn't know any such mapping given a single IP inbound. This is usually a business connect and of course costs a bit more because of the static ip.