hello. i was wondering how how to deal with dynamic IP's. my situtation is that i would like to use a remote access such as Windows Desktop Sharing to connect to my work pc from home. I have it working fine except that my provider seems to change my external address very very often...like 5-10 times a day. Yes that is a lot, but ipchicken doesn't lie. my question is this. how could i go about setting up something, to recognize when the routers WAN IP has changed, and have it send an email at that time with the new IP to an account? I am proficent in C++, Java, and Java web stuff as well (JSPs, Servlets, etc). Basically, is this possible. It seems simple, but I am sure it is a pain. I was thinking running an intervaled traceroute. checking the first hop against other first hops in a queue or vector. if differnt send an email. Any other ideas? thanks for the help, and any other suggestions are appreciated. take care. hippiejoe

I would recommend you use any of the many free dynamic dns servers. These handly little programs create a domain name such as yourname.dns2go.com that tracks your ip address and reports any changes to the company, who redirect accordingly. Here are a few I've seen around: no-ip winip dynu more from download.com I have no idea how to do this in any programming language from scratch. -SN

yes...thank you for responding. however, i should have mentioned that i am behind a linksys router. therefore when i install the free software...it is looking for changes to my 192 private address, and not the external interface on the router. therefore i have ods.org pointing to my wan address, but winip only keeping track of my internal. as soon as my external address changes i am out of luck again. thanks you i will keep trying. anyother ideas will help. take care. hippiejoe

Since you are able to program in C++, why dont you create a socket, connect to IPChicken.com and send a simple HTTP request. Then parse the data they send back and pull out your IP they give you. Then using another socket...or even the same one, you could send yourself an email with SMTP. Do this on a timer of 5 minutes or something. It should be really simple. -Micah

http://www.whatismyip.com/ http://checkip.dyndns.org/ Those would be easier than IPChicken to pull out your IP. -Micah

I am behind a router as well, and those badboys worked well with me. Most of them connect to the server, and the server determines what ip it is connected to, so it will grab your wan ip. I was using the non-free planetdns.net service, but I would be surprised if none of the free ones worked behind a router. Good luck, -SN

I'm behind a router too... I use cjb.net for my url redirection and it works great...Only my IP hasn't changed for well over a year. Which is quite nice. dns2go.com had a nice service with a program that would send a heartbeat to their servers updating your wan IP. But, dns2go.com is no longer free:( -Micah