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! :)