Doc Searls posted today about his return to blogging after finishing a book he’s working on. Doc’s been blogging longer than most anyone else: twelve years!
Reading that rattled something in my brain, so I decided to check my own blogging record:
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Now that I understand why my Droid phone is using a panic-inducing IP address, I decided to try my hand again at getting the SIPdroid app to work with my home phone system.
My first try was to set my firewall rules to allow traffic from 28.x.x.x. The problem with this is that since the 28.x.x.x addresses aren’t advertised (and thus routable), my home server can get packets from them all day, but can’t send anything back. My ISPs routers don’t know what to do with them.
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A commenter’s tip has solved the mystery of why my phone’s voice traffic is coming from an IP address owned by the Department of Defense. By entering the code *#*#INFO#*#*, I was able to pull up a hidden menu which shows the rogue IP address as assigned to my phone.
The Department of Defense is squatting on a massive number of IPv4 addresses and is not using most of it. Phone networks like Sprint are borrowing these IP addresses because their networks are larger than the 16 million hosts that the 10.x.x.x network can provide.
It looks, as another MT.Net visitor theorized, like Sprint is assigning the (unused) DoD IP addresses internally to its phones and then NATting the traffic from the phones to the public IPs. Since SIP packets have an additional IP address embedded inside, Sprint’s firewalls aren’t NATting that IP and thus the ordinarily “private” IP address is getting through the NAT process.
Whew!
