Old Fart wrote:

> I'm an old fart late to moving to DSL from dialup, where I've been fond of
> my dynamic IP for various reasons.
>
> What's the best way with DSL to approximate the daily or hourly changing
> Internet address of a legacy dynamic IP?

This depends a lot on your ISP. Some will serve you up the same IP address
no matter what, until they decide it's time to change it. It's "tied" to
the MAC address of your DSL modem, which you can't adjust. At least not
without mucking up your connection.

The IP assignment is called a "lease". Depending on your OS, somewhere in
your network setup or networking tools there might be a utility that lets
you expire or let your lease go. Sometimes this is enough to get you a new
IP assigned. You can accomplish the same thing in effect, by powering down
your modem, waiting some amount of time (again determined by your
provider), and powering it back up. Either of these things may or may not
work.

The only other way I know of to force an IP address change, and again it
doesn't work in all cases, is to simulate an "attack" on your machine.
It's not too uncommon for an ISP to spot something like a Nessus or Nikto
probe and change your IP for you to fend of the attacker. How you manage
to make it look as though someone elseis probing you, is another matter
all together.

The bottom line is you're pretty much at the mercy of your provider. They
may make it easy for you to change your IP, and they may make
it impossible. All depends on how their DHCP servers and security are set
up.