Well, I've had this running continuously (24/7) for more than 2 months, and excluding the odd brownout/power failure that happen periodically here and where the IP address would almost certainly be renewed, I'm left none the wiser!
Simply put, my ISP seems to renew IP addresses at random. The longest period between IP-changes was over 19 days. Whereas yesterday and during one 24hr period, it was renewed 3 times! Go figure...
So, not really of much use in helping determine when it would be a good time to try downloading a really large file from Letitbit (see initial post) - at least with my ISP.
Edit: An observation. I recently moved house and my wireless provider's signal at the new location really sucks! Initially I could barely connect at all, however my ISP seemed to be 'dynamically' searching for the best frequencies for my connection for the first few weeks. I counted on one occasion being disconnected/reconnected over 10 times in a single hour. I have also witnessed these inconvenient disconnections many times since, though nowhere near as many concurrently. What seems to happen is that when I start to to max-out my download speed on a really bad connection (50-100kB/s), the ISP will intentionally disconnect/reconnect to try and improve the speed. This is both welcome and maddening - it depends on what's been downloaded. The signal today was particularly bad, coming in between 19 - 22%. Normally it's between 30 - 40% I often had no better a signal level at the old address but generally had great download speeds - 600-700kB/s, which is about all my Huawei E122 modem can provide. So now I'm beginning to wonder if it could be a poor contention-ratio that's at the root of my problem.
I also bought a 3G antenna in the hope of improving things. This turned out to be a disaster. This (passive) antenna had an advertised 30DBi gain - this equates to a signal-gain of 1000!!! Had I done the calculation before ordering it, I don't think I would have bought it. It turns out to have a negative-gain - the signal-strength actually drops when it's connected! I gave the Ebay Seller a 'neutral' feedback-rating (rather than negative-feedback) reasoning they were merely a reseller, so weren't to blame. So I was surprised when Ebay advised me to open a case against them if I wasn't happy with their product - which I proceeded to do. I was in quick succession contacted by the Seller asking me to reverse my decision, informing me that Ebay now will remove Sellers that have more than a 5% per month customer dissatisfaction-rate, having received either 'neutral' or 'negative' feedback - this really seems to terrify Ebay Sellers! Compare this to the 'couldn't-case-less' attitude of Aliexpress Sellers! Suffice it to say, I got to keep the antenna while also getting an on-the-spot refund! Of course, the antenna is a worthless good-for-nothing piece of crap, so no real gain! (pun intended).
27 September 2012
18 July 2012
Public-IP Monitor.
This blog is simply somewhere to 'homepage' various little applications I have written and plan to make available as 'freeware'.
Public-IP Monitor is a trivial little utility that may be of interest to anyone whose ISP issues dynamic IP addresses - probably most - and was curious as to the frequency of these IP address changes.
As many will know, most 'free' file-sharing sites such as 'Rapidshare' impose severe restrictions on non-paying users, one being the inability to continue downloads. Not such a problem with small files but a serious hindrance where very large ones are concerned. One exception to the rule is the Russian company 'Letitbit' who allow continuation of downloads to non-suscribers. "Great!" I thought, and proceeded to download a huge 3gig file, at an imposed speed-limit of about 50kB/s - not a problem really as I could just restart the download if the connection timed-out etc. WRONG - what I didn't realise was that if your public-IP changes during the download then their file download-continuation policy is null & void for non-paying users! Well, I had about 2gig downloaded when my ISP decided to renew my public-IP address, which really left me frothing at the mouth. But to Letitbit's credit, they clearly state this in their FAQ, it's just that I hadn't bothered reading it!
Anyway as a result of that experience, I began wondering about how frequently do ISP's that provide dynamic IP-addresses to their customers, renew the IP addresses. And since I couldn't find anything available to show this, freely or otherwise, I wrote this.
It just displays the Current & Previous IP addresses and the time-interval between their issuing. It checks at 5 minute intervals and 'pops-up' on the screen, producing an 'Audio alert' (if checked) when an IP-change is detected. If the 'one-off' radio-button is checked, it will remain visible on the screen thereafter, otherwise it hides itself again after 1 minute. Pressing CTRL-SHIFT-L will unhide it for 10 seconds.
Public-IP Monitor.
Edit: For something that does so little I am surprised both by the number of bugs it had, and the fact that I'm still playing with it! So, less bugs now (I hope!) and it also saves the current configuration, meaning that if for example Public-IP Monitor is set to auto-start when Windows boots and 'auto-hide' was enabled the last time it had been run, it will now start 'invisibly' and with the last user-defined settings.
Edit: The website that allowed this to work has gone all commercial, requiring you to now sign-up for the service, while also reducing the "free" part to a practically-useless 12 IP-address requests per day - it was 288 per day! Needless to say I won't be updating this. :)
Edit: I came across a site today quite by accident that allows free IP look-ups, and thought "what the hell!", so spent 30min getting this working again. I recall using the sites free service that mapped dynamic IP's to hostnames over ten years ago - nice to see that they're still around! Having just had a look at the site, it appears they no longer offer any free service which is a shame. But hey, their prices seem reasonable and I do at least have IP lookups from them. :)
Edit: It was a mistake to resurrect this, as the urge to play with it some more was just too great! It now caters for both American/rest-of-world dating formats, as well have having a IP-address history option, allowing you to examine IP-change statistics over extended periods. Just hit Ctrl+Shift+H to call it up. The latter is probably still buggy as hell, but hey, that's typical of my code in general! :)
Public-IP Monitor is a trivial little utility that may be of interest to anyone whose ISP issues dynamic IP addresses - probably most - and was curious as to the frequency of these IP address changes.
As many will know, most 'free' file-sharing sites such as 'Rapidshare' impose severe restrictions on non-paying users, one being the inability to continue downloads. Not such a problem with small files but a serious hindrance where very large ones are concerned. One exception to the rule is the Russian company 'Letitbit' who allow continuation of downloads to non-suscribers. "Great!" I thought, and proceeded to download a huge 3gig file, at an imposed speed-limit of about 50kB/s - not a problem really as I could just restart the download if the connection timed-out etc. WRONG - what I didn't realise was that if your public-IP changes during the download then their file download-continuation policy is null & void for non-paying users! Well, I had about 2gig downloaded when my ISP decided to renew my public-IP address, which really left me frothing at the mouth. But to Letitbit's credit, they clearly state this in their FAQ, it's just that I hadn't bothered reading it!
Anyway as a result of that experience, I began wondering about how frequently do ISP's that provide dynamic IP-addresses to their customers, renew the IP addresses. And since I couldn't find anything available to show this, freely or otherwise, I wrote this.
It just displays the Current & Previous IP addresses and the time-interval between their issuing. It checks at 5 minute intervals and 'pops-up' on the screen, producing an 'Audio alert' (if checked) when an IP-change is detected. If the 'one-off' radio-button is checked, it will remain visible on the screen thereafter, otherwise it hides itself again after 1 minute. Pressing CTRL-SHIFT-L will unhide it for 10 seconds.
Public-IP Monitor.
Edit: For something that does so little I am surprised both by the number of bugs it had, and the fact that I'm still playing with it! So, less bugs now (I hope!) and it also saves the current configuration, meaning that if for example Public-IP Monitor is set to auto-start when Windows boots and 'auto-hide' was enabled the last time it had been run, it will now start 'invisibly' and with the last user-defined settings.
Edit: The website that allowed this to work has gone all commercial, requiring you to now sign-up for the service, while also reducing the "free" part to a practically-useless 12 IP-address requests per day - it was 288 per day! Needless to say I won't be updating this. :)
Edit: I came across a site today quite by accident that allows free IP look-ups, and thought "what the hell!", so spent 30min getting this working again. I recall using the sites free service that mapped dynamic IP's to hostnames over ten years ago - nice to see that they're still around! Having just had a look at the site, it appears they no longer offer any free service which is a shame. But hey, their prices seem reasonable and I do at least have IP lookups from them. :)
Edit: It was a mistake to resurrect this, as the urge to play with it some more was just too great! It now caters for both American/rest-of-world dating formats, as well have having a IP-address history option, allowing you to examine IP-change statistics over extended periods. Just hit Ctrl+Shift+H to call it up. The latter is probably still buggy as hell, but hey, that's typical of my code in general! :)
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