Constantly changing IP?

[MPaul]

Today, when I saw the number of votes on my poll go up so suddenly, I knew there was some foul play involved. The poll actually stores a users IP address, to keep him from voting more than once. I knew this was always a problem, since dial-up users get a different IP every time they connect, so I knew that a dial-up user "smart" enough to know this, could mess up the poll results. In the poll IP logs, I found almost the same IP 3 times, with the last 3 digits differing. So I decided to look in the web log of the day and it was exactly what I suspected, it was probably the same person, since the IPs changed in such a short amount of time. But what I found to be really strange was that the IP (actually, the last 3 digits) changed from one second to the other. The user is using AOL.

Do AOL users have constantly changing IP addresses?

[Andilinks]

Do AOL users have constantly changing IP addresses? I don't know about constantly but the "Change Screen Name" feature will change the IP and this is very easy to do especially if you have a static cable IP and connect to AOL with a TCP/IP connection.

One of the several reasons I maintain a 4.95/mo. AOL account is this anonymizer feature--though I don't use it to mess with people's polls. :)

Andi

[MPaul]

Thanks for telling me about this anonymizer thing. I'm actually happy that this happened, because it finally made me get off my lazy butt to find a new and better poll. So, I'm getting a new poll which uses cookies and IPs to keeps users from voting twice :D .

[pier]

Do AOL users have constantly changing IP addresses?
Yups :) AOL is known for this: users surf through proxies, which might (read: will) change during the same session. One proxy will for example fecth the images on your site, another one fetched the .html-file, and other one randomly fetches other stuff, all during the same request. So much for HTTP/1.1 Keepalive's...

Very nice when tracing users in you logs. AOL-users scatter IP's all through you logfiles. Loadbalancers (atleast, F5's) even have seperate classes for sticky connections for AOL-users (read: bad statefull solution).

- Pier
[ And don't get me started on AOL's randomized behaviour in their mail-servers ]

[Andilinks]

One proxy will for example fecth the images on your site, another one fetched the .html-file, This is an interesting aspect I hadn't considered. It means that a single session may register in the stats as several users and also explains some sessions consisting of a single hit.

The way the AOL interface is set up I thought that each browser occurance could be a new IP, but if the IP changes within a single browser occurance the picture changes.

Ahhh what a tangled www we weave...

Andi

[cindik]

...when files we practice to retrieve.

[Andilinks]

:ROFL: (a nod to Sir Walter Scott)