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SpencerKarnovski

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No emails - company public IP gone from Static to Dynamic, but its not ISP fault.. ?

Hello there.  We are having a nightmare here at work.

Yesterday around 12:30 we lost our internet connection.  I looked on our router status page (our router is very old, it does not have a configuration page - only a connection status page, with options to login - still, the router has worked fine).  Now BT said its obviously an issue with them, however they checked the line, circuit said it was fine.  Sent someone out to the local exchange, they said that was fine..  But, all through this we still have not got a connection (costing us loads as we run based on emails).

I spoke to them told them nothing has worked still, so they said they would send round an engineer in the morning.   Well about 17:30, just before I was going to leave, the connection status changed on the router and we were back online.  However, we still could not send + receive emails.

So, I come in the morning and to cut a long story short - our public IP address (which is used by our domain name hosts, to forward our company emails to) has changed.  It has changed to a dynamic address.  

So, I have been speaking to BT for the past 4 hours, to 3 different departments, each one of them saying our 5 static IP address are being broadcast, and its down to us to configure our router (which cannot be configure, and has not ever had to be) to connect to our static IP addresses.

Now, they know we are on a different IP address, yet I have to wait 4 hours for the support to team to verify this, then get back to me.  

Nothing has changed my end, no configurations nothing.  We just lost our connection, then came back up and we have a different IP address.

Does anyone know what could have happened here?
Does anyone know why they are saying that are 5 static IP addresses are still working, but our router is not picking up our main public IP address any more, but a static one.  Surely this has nothing to do with us?

Thanks

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ccomley
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Does your router use one of the static IPs for it's own address? if not, it may be that they "route" your static IPs to whatever wan IP your router gets when it logs in - in which case teh LAN config of your router is at issue. But, as you say, how can it have changed?

Avatar of Jan Bacher
Did BT provider the router?  Was the router in routed or bridged mode?
Yet another reason not to use BT.
Setup a Dynamic DNS account and get your MX records changed to point to it. That will allow you to continue to receive email while BT decide to fix the problem with their network.
Then ask BT for a MAC code and take your business elsewhere. You can be rid of them in 10 days.
Having the dynamic DNS account also means you can get the IP address of your service provider working very quickly.

You could try hard coding the external IP address in to the router, but if that doesn't work, tell BT where to put their service. I did that a few years ago and haven't looked back since.

Simon.
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SpencerKarnovski

ASKER

BT have got to be the worst company I have ever had to deal with.  This issue is now critical for us.  We still have no email from last Wednesday.  

Our non-configurable router (its an old Siemens 5830 router) which was pre-installed with firmware/settings by BT when they setup the network about 5 years ago.  The only page we can see on the router is a Connection status page.

Now after we suddenly lost internet connection on Wednesday around 14:00, it came back on about 17:30, our router was picking up a dynamic IP address, which of course means our MX record was now misconfigured for our domain host - no emails.

So after 2 days of speaking to BT, they say nothing has changed their end - we are still being assigned our x5 static IP addresses, we still have the same range etc..

Well, something must have happened for it to suddenly change.  Anyway, I digress.  So, they ask us to install the 2wire BT business hub - they will not help us configure any other router, they will not send out an engineer (we have 8 hour emergency callout!!), because this engineer will not touch any of our equipment (wat?).  However, the BT business hub will not work on our Windows 2000 network.

So now we are bascailly left high and dry - I'm no expert, so we called in an IT company - well, they are just as stuck as we are.  They brought in another router to configure it, but cannot get it configured correctly.  We had a firewall (which no one has the right password to configure) that only will let traffic from our old router through - so it must have some configuration.  

So, not really sure where to go from here. Its a giant mess.   We just need to configure a router to accept one of our static IP addresses, but no matter what static IP address we try to use out of range - nothing will work.  The only way we can get internet to work is if we use our old non-configurable router + dynamic IP address, which they are not sending us.   BT are terrible.

The believe the router was in bridge mode - without being able to look at any configuration page.  
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Mestha
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Hi Simon

We have been losing internet connection because the IT "experts" that we called in (I only have 8 months experience) have been trying to sort this issue out.

Basically, the existing router we had is not longer supported.  The 2wire router they sent all does not pass more than one static IP address, we have 5 static IP addresses.  We have a firewall to which we cannot gain access to because of a unknown password.  So basically when we try to configure the 2wire with a single static IP address, thats all it will pass through.

So BT have said we can try another router and hope that works - they admit the situation is a joke, but  there is nothing more they can do.  

Absolute joke.
Provided good reasoning, which helped make the right decision.