Verizon DSL?

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (jc at trillian.mit.edu)]

While investigating ways to get a real Internet hookup at home, I ran
across the following curious claim in Verizon's FAQ:

   Can I register a domain name for my Web page?
   No.  Because Verizon has a dynamic IP allocation scheme, we do not
   currently support this function.

Now, this first struck me as clueless, because of  course  web  pages
don't  have  domain  (DNS)  names, network interfaces do.  Then their
curious explanation reached my conscious mind.  Dynamic IP  addresses
are the main reason you'd need a DNS, name, of course.  With a static
IP address, you could give people the address, and a DNS name is nice
but  not  absolutely  required.   But with a dynamic IP address, this
wouldn't work, and  you  need  a  DNS  name  to  discover  what  your
machine's address is at the moment.

Well,  of  course,  if  you're on the machine, ifconfig will probably
tell you.  But if I'm at work and want to ssh into the  machine,  how
could I discover its address?  Or are they telling me that they don't
allow things like sshing into a home machine?

I've noticed that some folks do seem to have DSL links.  Can you  get
into your machine from the outside?  If so, how do you do it?

(I've sent a question to Verizon, but I expect that the  answer  will
also be clueless.  ;-)

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