I ordered a static IP from my ISP awhile back, and they now inform me that it's been set up. I can ping the IP they gave me, but when I visit any site that displays my IP address, it doesn't match what my ISP said my static IP was. Before I call them, I wanted to see exactly what checks I can run myself to make sure the static IP is activated properly.

We've got a DSL connection, routed to a network of four computers. I thought that, after we got a static IP, any of the four computers on our network would show up in online logs as coming from our static IP. If that's how it works, something's wrong and I need to call the ISP.
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I'm not completely clear what you are saying here. What online logs? Are you trying do web hosting of your site, or a site, or some sites?

The machines on your network, within your network, are going to show as their IP addresses on the network.

Any request they make for an external resource is going to run through the following path:

1. The hosts file on the local machine
   
2. The default gateway, which in this case will be your router. The router won't be logging anything, assuming it's a standard router.
   
3. Any request your local network can't resolve will go to the next step, the DNS servers listed either in the local machines or the router.
   

Where is the logging occuring? If it's occuring on your ISP, which would be really weird, all requests are going to be coming from your static IP address, your router will route them to the correct machine inside your network.

If the logging is happening on a server in your network, the requests will be logged from the network IP addresses, the ones starting with 192.168.x.x.

You can check out your local network activity using a tool like ethereal. That's a network monitor, you can save and analyze all network traffic.

If you were running a real DNS server, with logging, you could see where each machine had gone every day, that's always fun since the boss has no idea that you can see each porn site he's visited that day... LOL

How to check if you have a Static IP with Broadband
To see if you have a static IP address, just visit a site like webmasterworld, log out, on top of the page you can see this:

visitor from IP address: <your ip address>

That's the actual IP address your request is coming from. I use the same tool on this forum to double check my IP address.

The other way you can check out your IP address is to login to your router, usually they have a web interface, and look for the WAN connection information, that will show you what your WAN [Wide Area Network, as opposed to LAN, Local Area Network] IP address is. With DSL, it's easy to check if you have a static IP. Just do this:

• Check your IP address using either of the above methods
  
• Unplug Modem Power
  
• Unplug router power
  
• Plug Modem back in, wait for lights to cycle and stabilize
  
• Plug in Router, wait for lights to cycle and stabilize
  
• Check your IP address using either of the above methods
  

If the IP address did not change, you have a static IP. They will also have given you that IP usually, so you can double check that the IP they assiigned you is in fact the IP you have on you WAN connection.
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Well, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back here to reply!

I went through the steps you said and basically found that the static IP hadn't been set up. After some wrangling with my ISP, the setup has been completed and I've verified that it works.

The "online logs" I mentioned was basically a clumsy way of saying that I visited a few sites that tell you your IP (including a simple script I wrote) and found that they weren't reporting my static IP. That was what made me think something was wrong in the first place.
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