When I go to iknowwhatyoudownload.com, a bunch of stuff shows up for my IP that’s definitely not being downloaded by anyone in my house (foreign language torrents). Aside from that my router (AT&T Arris BGW210) needs to be restarted about once a week, due to some kind of dhcp issue. The most recent event seemed bad - none of my devices had internet, they could all talk to each other, and my ONT activity light was flickering steadily. During this time I had no access to the router, even plugged in directly to LAN. Fixed by a restart but no idea what was going on.
The DHT torrent thing has been happening for months and the router thing could just be that AT&T sucks. I have no other evidence that something is wrong.
I could buy a firewall and put it downstream of the AT&T equipment.
I could switch internet providers, get a new IP address and router, and see if that fixes it.
Should I try to figure out what’s going on or just keep restarting the router once a week and ignore the DHT hits from my static IP?
Are you sure your IP is only used by you?
AFAIK ISPs usually bundle the traffic of users to a few public IP addresses, so maybe the things you see are just someone else in your area going out from the same IP your ISP provides.
But I’m not actually sure if this is how it works, I might be wrong.
I don’t pay for a static IP, but it never changes. I have some dns entries pointing home and I never need to update them in the past 4 years at least.
That makes it incredibly likely you are behind a NAT that runs multiple people’s traffic through the same public IP. If your ISP supports IPv6 you can always check that address, that shouldn’t be shared.
Do CGNATs nowadays support port forwarding? Because my understanding was that most CGNAT setups make incoming connections nearly impossible and the few exceptions work by reserving a few port numbers for each customer. But OP doesn’t seem to have any trouble with port forwarding.
