I'm a relatively new webmistress so please be gentle with me

I'm running a chatroom on my site, for use by myself and a few friends. I've tried to keep it as private as possible but it seems that the address is being passed around and may already have been gotten hold of by some nasty people who I don't want in there

Last night, someone strange logged in. I looked up the log to see what the IP number was, and was surprised to see that the number was exactly the same as that of someone who was already logged in. I mean exactly the same, digit for digit. I would not have thought this was possible, I thought that each of these numbers was unique. Can anyone explain this?

unless its a proxy server or its from a public computer where many ppl has access to it and ur friend accidently left the room open.

or if they are on a dialup then each time a person dials the connection he is giving a diff ip. so if ur friend chats with you now and logs out. chances are she mite not get the same ip next time arnd.

No my friend wasn't using a public computer, it was his own PC. Also, my friend was still logged into the room and was still chatting to me, when this other person logged in with the exact same IP address.

Could be a problem with the chat room software itself. What are you using?

I'm using e_Chat 4.5

hmm, one address cannot resolve to two computers. if this were possible the Internet would like totally fail. I think something is being missed.

Are you sure your friend didn't log in a seconed time in an attempt to fool you? Unless there is a bug in the chat room code, or your friend is using a proxy, I don't see any other reason for it.

No my friend definitely did not log in a second time to fool me. The unidentified user logged in again today, with exactly the same IP number as before. My friend was at work at the time and therefore could not possibly have logged in.

The ISP involved is AOL. Can anyone shed any light on what is going on here?

All AOL user go via a cluster of proxy servers so every AOL user in the world share about 5 IPs.

Originally Posted by asm

hmm, one address cannot resolve to two computers. if this were possible the Internet would like totally fail.

Not strictly correct. Any users behind corporate/office gateways or on a home user network all share a single IP. I have 5 machines accessing the internet on a single IP.
People using anonymiser proxies are on a single IP, AOL and some other large ISPs use proxies.

In these cases the Proxy/Gateway device does the routing to the sub-net or internal IP.

We have a setup here that acts just like that. We have N computers behing our router all of which ID themselves as our routers static IP. The trick been that your router/ proxy is the only thing that is bothered about the IP as it handles what traffic is for what machine on the subnet.

Ibbo

i know mebe the isp gives da same ip for everyone.
it hapened back when i went to school, lol
all my friends posted on a forum and since i was admin there i could see ip's. and all of ours was the same. EXACTLY