What is a good way to keep track of a device's IP in the WAN?

Question

I have an idea on how I would go ahead and tackle this problem. But I'm just not too sure if this is quite right, and I would like your input on this.

I'm working on a house that I need to communicate with, remotely.

Now, it already happened that in 2010, the IP that the house was assigned to was of one address, but just recently, it changed into another. I am fully aware this might happen again. It's time-consuming work for retrieving the new IP address, so I want an automated way to always keep track of the house even with the IP changing from time to time.

Signing up for a static IP is out of the question, at the moment.

So this is what I was thinking of doing:

• have a servlet (written in perhaps Ruby, Python, or JavaScript for Node.js) make HTTPS requests to a server that we own with its own domain name
• the server has a servlet running as well, which listens for requests
• any requests it receives, it will keep track of the request's IP address
• of course the request will have a security token that will make sure that the request is indeed coming from the house.

Now, I am fully aware there might be security holes. Perhaps, also, my solution is horrible, and there are better ways out there, so I need your guy's input on this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

It varies a little depending on where you want the changes to be reflected, but in many cases, people use (free for personal use) services such as DynDNS or No-IP, which come with what is known as "update clients" that perform the task you're describing.

So, as an example, say that you sign up with No-IP; you'd have an address such as "myhouse.no-ip.com" which is kept up to date automatically with their update client.