Technology: Changing WAN IP The Router Way To Bypass IP Ban

Image from mybloggerlab

Sometimes, for some reason, you visit a website and did something legal but that website still blocked your IP so that you can never visit them again. What can we do?

First, we have to know what IP address we are talking about.

To keep this post overly simple, there are two basic IP addresses: LAN and WAN

LAN stands for Local Area Network while WAN stands for Wide Area Network. Basically, LAN are all the devices connected to your home router and the LAN IP address are the identity numbers for each device, whereas WAN is what your Internet Service Provider (ISP) takes care of, including assigning a WAN IP address to each customer's home, possibly taken up by a router.

Image from montrealpcsupport.com

So in a way, the WAN IP address is like your home address, your mother (or someone) is the router and LAN IP address is like your ID card number. If your friend wants to send you a parcel, it will first go to a post office, and postman will then forward the parcel to your home following your home address (WAN IP), when the parcel arrives at your home, your mother (the router) takes the parcel and the pass it to you (LAN IP). Because your mother knows the parcel has your name on it, so she will not pass it to your siblings wrongly.

Now the above analogy is not exactly the whole picture, but it is enough to solve our problem.

Image from Hong Kong Broadband Network

Usually, websites block the WAN IP address instead of the LAN IP address, there are a number of technical reasons but you run a website and you want to ban someone, don't you think it is much more effective to ban the WAN IP address?

Sometimes, for some ISPs which provide dynamic (WAN) IP addresses, meaning that the ISPs update your WAN IP address regularly, changing the WAN IP address to bypass the website's ban is as simple as rebooting the router. Other ISPs offering static (WAN) IP addresses or changeable but rather persistent WAN IP addresses would mean you will continue to be banned for quite awhile.

Hong Kong Broadband (HKBN), which I have been using for years, belongs to the persistent WAN IP kind. Their WAN IP seldom changes at all despite actually being dynamic.

If you are using HKBN, and if you are using a router at home, here's what you need to do to change the WAN IP address to bypass IP ban from the website.

My router's interface, WAN IP removed for obvious reason
Image from Locky's English Playground

Start a browser, type (in general cases)

192.168.1.1

and log in with your password.

Depending on the type of router you have, the following steps might be different, but basically, you want to change your Router's MAC address to force the ISP to assign a new WAN IP.

Type a new MAC address you like
Image from Locky's English Playground

So under MAC Address, you type in a new 12 digit MAC address for your router (0-9, a-f / A-F), with a colon between every 2 digits, and then save it. When your router reboots, the ISP will assign a new WAN IP address for you, then all you have to do is to visit that website which banned you before and see if they are still banning you now. Chances is, they aren't and they can't.

Hope this can help you!


PS: One assignment down, 3 more to go and the never ending thesis. I think the best I can do is to keep up with short updates like this one. Learning never stops, but writing them takes time. My apologies to you all.



Resources:
How can I change MAC address in router ASUS DSL-N11? - @Super User
http://superuser.com/questions/335168/how-can-i-change-mac-address-in-router-asus-dsl-n11