Getting Home With a Dynamically Allocated IP

I recently had my Comcrap Cable shut off for downloading too much. Apparently, my 'unlimited' service did not protect me at all because I use cable. Basically, since the whole neighborhood shares one main cable connection, if I 'overuse' bandwidth, I am affecting other peoples service too. Its better anyway... AT&T DSL is faster in my dense neighborhood anyway.

The only problem I had to deal with after the switch was getting back into my Server at home. Comcrap uses a dynamic IP, but it only changes once... if ever. AT&T changes your IP several times a week. If I want to access my home machine and the IP has changed, I have no way to do so until I get home. There are services you can pay for that will monitor your external IP and such and such, but I wanted an easier way out. I setup my home machine to send its IP out and store it on another server, then I setup an alias from my laptop to read that server:

On the Home Server (sendip.sh):

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#!/bin/bash curl www.whatismyip.com/automation/n09230945.asp > /tmp/homeip.txt scp /tmp/homeip.txt server_username@example_server:/path/to/homeip.txt rm /tmp/homeip.txt

A cronjob setup on the Home Server:

0,15,30,45 * * * * /Content/Other/Scripts/sendip.sh

This calls my script every 15 minutes. The script gets the IP from whatismyip.com, writes it to a temp file, sends the temp file to my server and then deletes the temp file. I also setup a alias on my remote machine that reads this file and lets me ssh back home!

alias home='ssh home_username@`curl http://example_server.com/path/to/homeip.txt`'

I sent my homeip.txt file to a webserver so I use curl to read it, but you can use whatever you want in your alias to read that file.

I hope this helped somebody... there may be better ways but this works and takes 5 lines.

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