Tuesday, April 18, 2006

I Don’t Understand Anything Anymore

A couple of weeks ago I was checking on the data traffic coming in and out of the studio and I noticed something odd. There was a steady stream of data coming from a machine on our network out to the outside world. It started at about 9:30 in the evening and would wrap up at about 9 the next morning. It’s like there was a small pirate internet radio station operating out of my network. Which is fine, I suppose, (everybody loves pirates, right? Arrr!) but we have to pay for the bandwidth, and if there’s something goofy happening on “my” network and I’m not the one who did it, I need to know what it is.

I whipped out my handy dandy packet sniffer and got to work. Ethereal also works, but then you have to muck around with X11, and I couldn’t be bothered with that.

Long story short. Our ancient HP LaserJet 5000 was sending out a stream of DHCP requests. And for some reason they were crossing our ‘net connection and going out into the wide, wild world. And this was happening every night, all night long.

I have no idea why it started to do this. It had been well-behaved for years. I changed it to have a static IP address and that shut it up. Simple, but mystifying as to why it decided to freak out every night.

Anyway, here are some screen grabs and if someone would like to offer an explanation, I’d be delighted to hear a technical discussion, wild guesses or even just sympathy from others who generally understand technology, but are every so often are completely confuzzled. (click for larger versions)

Here’s the traffic usage graph from our ISP. The big green blocks are the HP chatting with the rest of the planet.

This one shows that the HP (192.168.0.64) is “talking” to the broadcast addy (192.168.0.255)

And here we can see that we are dealing with DHCP requests.

The thing is… it already HAD an IP address. No one was bothering it, trying to take it’s address away. It had NO reason to want a different IP address.

Whatever.

I hate computers.

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