Looking for a client for Dynamic DNS. This is a program that goes out and pings the DynDNS web service and tells it what your current IP address is.

DynDNS runs a service that will tell you what your current public IP address. This is handy…in any web browser just type http://checkip.dyndns.com.

DynDNS recommends using software clients to do updates, although the functionality is embedded in most home routers.

…[I]n practice we have found that router based clients just don’t provide the same level of reliability and user experience as software clients. For this reason, our current recommendation is that customers use a software client whenever possible, even if their router has a DDNS client built into it and even if that DDNS client has been certified by us.

Using the command line version of inadyn, I tried the following which does a one-time update:

C:\DynDNS_Client>inadyn --username myname --password mypass --alias mydnsname.gotdns.com

This returns the following:

INADYN: Started 'INADYN version 1.96.2' - dynamic DNS updater.
I:INADYN: IP address for alias 'mydnsname.gotdns.com' needs update to '24.61.26.209'
I:INADYN: Alias 'mydnsname.gotdns.com' to IP '24.61.26.209' updated successful.

Now, of interest here is that the one time update does not simply execute and then return to the command line….in fact it creates a loop that executes repeatedly. By default this appears to be one minute, and what happens is that program first does an ip address update. On subsequent passes, it first sends a query to checkip.dyndns.org and compares the results with the stored IP. If they are different then it will perform another update. This is more evident if you add –verbose 5 to the command line; you’ll get a printout as the program goes through the steps.

So, I’m going to try installing this as a software service on my XP workstation; and disabling it in the router.