As I noted last year, BT, the ISP I use here in Ireland, disconnects broadband sessions on a daily basis, assigning a new IP address; this is really aggravating to anyone who uses a VPN, such as most telecommuters. Reportedly, this is done to work around deficiencies in their billing system.
A comment from Jeremy on that post suggested something interesting, though:
Just had a very helpful tech support guy on from BT. [… he] told me to restart the modem sometime that will make it convenient for the 24 hour IP change – i.e. restart it at 6am, and then it’ll change IP every day at 6am.
I’ve tested this, and it works. Much more convenient! Now the renumbering and VPN breakage can take place when I want it to — at the start of the workday, instead of some random point chosen by BT’s billing system. Quite an improvement.
To make this useful, here’s a script, “reboot-zyxel”, which will reboot your Zyxel P-660RU router remotely over the LAN. (It requires perl and curl.)
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