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Our global IP address (the IP address that points to your network at your house) is very important if we want to access things on our devices connected to our home networks. Each of your devices have a local IP address, which probably looks something like this…192.168.x.x. This address is the local address and does NOTHING for us when we are outside our network (i.e. connected to the Internet at our office or friend’s house).

What we want in an A plus certification course is a challange. What we want…is the GLOBAL IP Address. How do we find this? Well, this is the address your Internet provider gives to you and is probably sitting on your wireless or wired router in your house somewhere. To find out what your CURRENT global ip address is, you can go to a site like: whatismyipaddress. You will see the address towards the top of this page. Mine looks something like 122.22.x.x.

This will tell you what your global IP address is. So now you can access things through the internet to your home network. You will most likely need to setup port forwarding in your router to allow the communication to go through to the server software and applications you have running on your PC or Mac at home. Search my site on how to setup port forwarding.

Okay, so what’s all this talk about Dynamic DNS service?

Well, the problem most people have is that their global IP is always changing, this is called a dynamic IP address service. Most DSL and fiber optic line services that average consumers pay for come with dynamic IPs, mean they change from time to time. If you want, you can of course pay for the upgrade or just request a free change (depending on provider) to a static IP address service. This would solve your problem of the IP addresses constantly changing. Luckily, there are companies out there providing a solution to us average consumers with dynamic IPs.

That service is called Dynamic DNS service. Basically a company will give you a subdomain address off of their registered addresses that will point to your global ip address. One such company is DYNDNS.org. They have a free Dynamic DNS service and is pretty easy to setup. You just create an account on their website, select the FREE dynamic dns service (look for it…it’s hidden) and then select a name and domain. You can get something like myname.dyndns.org.

Now that name, myname.dyndns.org, will point to your global ip address 122.23.x.x. So instead of using the 122.23.x.x address you just need to memorize your domain myname.dyndns.org and provide that to any application that needs your global ip address.

But what happens when my IP changes?

Good question, your myname.dyndns.org will still be pointing to your old global IP address and your app will no longer work!

WHAT A MINUTE! HOW IS THIS HELPFUL?

You’ll need to download DYNDNS.org’s software that will update their servers with your global IP address as it changes. This software can be installed on a MAC or PC and it just sits in the background checking your global address every 5-10 minutes and updates the DYNDNS.org servers anytime it changes. This way your myname.dyndns.org will always be pointing to your most up to date IP.

If you’re lucky, your router will have the ability to do this for you. You should log into your router and look for something called DDNS. If it has this, it should have a preferred company that it’s configured to work with. Most will have dyndns.org as they are the largest free DDNS service company. You can setup your username/password in our router and have the router take care of your address updating to the DDNS service provider.

This is particularly important if you plan to use something like WOL (wake on lan) to turn on your PC while you are away from your home. Since your PC is turned off, the software can’t run to update your current IP address, so you would have to write down your IP address before you left your house and hope it didn’t change before you need to use the WOL program to turn on your machine. If your router doesn’t support updating one of the DDNS service providers, I would recommend 1 of 2 things.

1.) Always leave your computer on
or
2.) buy a new router, they are cheap enough.

I hope this helps explain the different between a static and dynamic address and how to setup a dynamic DNS service to gain access to your computer and devices from outside your local network.

Written by Josh R Bellendir, 2/27/2011
Check out http://www.jbellendir.com for more articles, stories, tutorials, and reviews!

Written by Josh R Bellendir, Consultant

For more articles, stories, tutorials, and reviews like these, please check out http://www.jbellendir.com.