My company is trying to sign up for LexisNexis services. LexisNexis (or more specifically, a service offered by LexisNexis) restricts logins to either a handful of IPs, or a range of IPs. We just have a fairly basic business DSL connection that gives us a dynamic IP.
Obviously, every time our IP changes, we lose LexisNexis service. I've called AT&T's tech support several times hoping to find out what range of IPs we could possibly be assigned. Most people I got on the phone were absolutely clueless (after explaining my problem to the first person she said "oh, you mean like wireless internet?"). The one or two people I talked to that were actually knowledgeable pretty much told me that they couldn't or wouldn't give me that information.
LexisNexis refuses to relax their security requirements, and told me that I either have to find the applicable range or buy a static IP. Unfortunately, the cheapest static IP package from AT&T is something around $75/month, and we absolutely cannot afford that.
What should I do here? Was I fed misinformation from AT&T? Is it actually possible for them to give me a range or should I be looking elsewhere for solutions? This service is vital to our doing business.
Well AT&T will have a range of IP addresses that they give out to clients via DHCP. This range however will be very large, it will be used to service all their clients, giving you this IP range would be no use to you anyway, as you can't really go to LexisNexis and ask them to allow you access for this range of IP's, as it would effectively open it up to anyone on AT&T's service, or at least those users on that range if AT&T's ip allocation is over a number of ranges (which it probably is).
You really need to get yourself a static IP. If this service is vital to your business then the cost should be something your willing to pay. I'm sure there are cheaper providers than AT&T (Static IP's here in the UK cost about £5 a month on residential lines) but you'd need to change provider.
Try using VPN servers for that, order somewhere a VPN server with static IP.
Ok, let say you don't want change your Dynamic IP.
Check your IP (with someting like whatismyip.com) get the IP then $whois [IP_Address] | grep NetRange Works most of the time to know what IP might be assigned to you. The real information you are looking for is the CIDR that your provider will assign.
With ATT depends of the location for instance in Texas you mostly have a Bell South IP with several range, dig the whois information it will tells you the IP address range.
my 2 cents.
So your situation is that you absolutely need something and they are giving you requirements for their product.
If you need LexisNexis find some budget to cut so that you can afford $75/mo, or start leaving your cable modem on all the time so that your IP changes less often and figure out a way to notify yourself when it changes.
Can they work with a service like dyndns.org? Not a static IP, but a url that points back to your current ip address. That's a common trick for beating the dynamic ip.Other than that, you're out of luck. I don't think LexisNexis has much experience dealing with people who can afford their service, but not a static IP.
Is it possible? Yes. They have large blocks to hand out as needed. Problem is they have lots of customers and the pool of available IP's dwindles.
Your best bet is to find a way to get the static IP or find someone willing to proxy your web traffic for a low rate that will be a static IP or switch to another service provider with a lower rate for a static IP.
The problem is, AT&T has the right and motive to change this range whenever they see fit. So, even if you were to get the appropriate "range of IP addresses handed out to central TX DHCP" for today, tomorrow that range could change.
$75/month for a static IP is the way you want to go. That is pretty cheap in the grand scheme of things. If you need it, you need it, so just buy it.
There's already good advice here about using a VPN, but let me try to approach the problem from another angle.
Even if your IP address is assigned by DHCP it should not change much as long as you stay connected, because your computer will try to renew the DHCP lease well before it expires. In normal circumstances there is no reason the server would decline the renewal, so you can pretty much keep renewing that dynamic IP address indefinitely.
I'd find out how long the DHCP lease is and see whether it's being renewed at regular intervals. In Windows ipconfig /all will give you the lease time.
Get a 256 slice from slicehost.com at $20 / month, install openVPN on it, and give lexis that host's address. You'll need to bounce through their box to get there, but you get a static IP for twenty bucks that way.