X-no-Archive:yes
To borrow from a short-lived sci-fi series: Imagine that you could connect
to any computer in the world. Imagine that anyone in the world could connect
to you.

On a lark, I emailed my home PC's ipconfig output to work, wondering how
visible my home PC is from the public Internet. I have an always-on
connection, which I share with the rest of my little toy LAN. I had expected
it not to be visible at all. In fact, I had visited the Shields Up! page
<https://grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2> from this PC, and took comfort in the
fact that it told me that my PC was well shielded from prying eyes.

Imagine my surprise when I could ping my home IP address from my
workstation, and resolve the IP to the correct host name! Tracert (I know,
Ted) correctly shows all but the next to the last hop (or penultima, for our
William F. Buckley fans). Now, ftp, telnet, http, smb, and NetMeeting all
come away empty, failing to connect, but quickly.  OTOH, my subnet mask is
255.255.248.0, so if I understand correctly, there are 2032 or so IP
addresses out there that my PC will more happily chat with, and perhaps be
somewhat more friendly with than is in my own best interests. Just to keep
things interesting, ping fails from our dev 3000, but that is probably due
to some different routing and firewall issues, etc. (or is it?)

Other than rushing out on my way home and investing in any one of several
nifty firewall solutions, what should I do? Call my ISP's support and
complain? Call my ISP's accounting and cancel my account? Don't worry, be
happy?

I think that this might be of some interest to other list members, but for
those who want to dig into the nitty gritty with me, and / or have me try a
few things on my home PC, my personal email address at home is stigers, at
email, dot msn, dot com (where I already get enough spam, so sorry for the
ham-handed attempt to foil spiders).

On the chance that someone may get a laugh from the events that led up to me
emailing my home PC's ipconfig output to work, I'll add a further OT tangent
to this OT post. A friend kept emailing me large photos. I suggested that he
just share these in his personal web space and send me the URLs, since I
don't care to receive large email attachments. He pointed out that they live
on his D: drive, which I cannot see from home, or at least should not be
able to. I replied that I didn't know, but what was his current IP address?
I cannot repeat his reply. Nor have I received any more email from him...

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com
and no, I won't email you my IP address so that you can have a look, too.