How do I get a static IP address for my teapot?
I maintain this teapot:
It returns a 418 error when it is pinged, and it is pinged regularly by people arriving from the relevant Wikipedia page. (For those interested, and there appear to be a few of you, the relevent story is here)
It sits on a shelf in my office in the Computer Science department of a university and the support guys were kind enough to give it a dedicated IP address some years ago.
My contract is coming to an end in the next few weeks and it's occurred to me that I'm going to have to do something with the teapot. I'd like to take it home but I have no clue how to explain to my home broadband supplier that I want a dedicated IP address coming to my house so that people can ping a teapot.
Is there a reasonable way of having a server on a shelf in my house that people can ping via an IP address? What search terms can I use to find a solution to this problem?
"explain to my home broadband supplier that I want a dedicated IP address coming to my house so that people can ping a teapot" just not reference the teapot... they could think you're crazy!
By the way: just tell them you want a static ip address.
Please Note that in many countries, many ISP don't sell static IPs to consumer-class customers (but asking them is free!). If they don't want to give you one, you can create a DynamicDNS account to allow people to reach the teapot using a hostname (e.g.: myteapot.dyndns.org).
The word might just be "IPv6". It's entirely reasonable for a teapot to have an IPv6 address. The design of IPv6 allows you to have a whole subnet of IPv6 addresses for all devices in your home.
Does it have to be an IP address? The reason I ask is that it would be much easier (and cheaper) to use a domain to access it.
Doing this, you could maintain the same internet connection you have now at home, and use a service like dyn.com or noip.com to keep your domain (htcpcp.com maybe?) pointing to your home internet's dynamic IP. That way, when your modem reboots or your ISP changes the IP address you have, the domain will update to point to that.
The other option would be to call up your ISP and just tell them you want a static IP address. Some ISPs will charge you around $5/month for this service, while others will require you to upgrade to a business connection before allowing you to do this.
If you have any other questions let me know!