Readers of my blog over may recall I’m an amateur (ham) radio operator (N4IXT that’s me!). One of my ham radio buddies has a cool radio that can be remotely controlled over the internet. With their software he just enters the IP address of his home (his home router that is, after we setup some port forwarding), and he can connect to and operate his radio remotely, make contacts around the world and more.
The tricky part of all this came in the sentence enters the IP address of his home…. His home router tends to change its address on the whim of his service provider. If the router reboots, it will definitely have a new address when it comes up. You may be thinking “well just get a static IP address”. Unfortunately, his internet service provider can’t give him this, something about him using a bonded pair of 10 mb lines to get 20 mb prevents it.
So how could he get notified when his IP address changes? Well I was fairly certain I could solve his problem with some simple PowerShell scripting!
I’ve now published the solution on my GitHub site:
https://github.com/arcanecode/PowerShell/tree/master/IPAddressMailer
Rather than going more in-depth here, the ReadMe has the full details describing the scripts that were created. In addition the code is heavily commented.
In addition to solving this particular problem, the code could be used as a template for:
- Getting the IP Address of your home router
- Sending emails via GMail
- Setting up tasks in the Windows Task Scheduler
Hopefully other people with similar issues will find this little project as useful as my ham radio buddy has!
Arcane Code 