Shell Programming and Scripting

The usual method of figuring out anything's IP address would be a DNS server. Just because you have a dynamic one doesn't rule this out... There's free DNS hosting available from various places, and your computer would keep the DNS entry updated by running a small monitor script.

Keeping going with your current solution, if you don't want it to use ssh-agent, you can just undo the environment variables ssh-agent sets:

Code:

export SSH_AGENT_PID=""
export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=""

It's not that I don't want to use ssh-agent, it's that you have to be present after a reboot to type in the passphrase to unlock the secret key to use it. The nature of a remote system is that I won't be present.

But, actually, I think this might work after all. I killed ssh-agent and ran ssh (the remote computer isn't remote yet--it's right here), and it did indeed use the key I specified and I think it executed the bash script I set "command" equal to in that test.

I have to experiment some more to see if it really will do just what I need.

Well, sure, but you had the agent going anyway, and it messed up your program. I'm just telling you how to force it not to use ssh-agent without actually killing the agent. You can easily save the values for later if you want to put them back.

Yeah, I know about DynDNS, no-ip, ChangeIP and others.

I thought about that at one point, but I wanted to do it this way instead.
Though I guess I'll look into that if I can't get this to work.

---------- Post updated at 04:57 PM ---------- Previous update was at 04:54 PM ----------

Ah! I see. I'll have to try that when I get back to it.

I have a similar problem and I have a solution that I've used for many years and has worked without much of a glitch.

First on my home server I have lynx installed, using it I have a script to get the ip by calling w w w . whatismyip . com (or another of the IP services), then I send an eMail with it and I update my home page on the homepage served by my ISP for my server.

My favorite such site is queryip.net/ip/ because you don't have to use lynx or much of a script to scrape the IP. The IP address is all that's returned. Here's the whole script:

Code:

IP=$(curl -s http://queryip.net/ip/)
# or
IP=$(wget -q -O- http://queryip.net/ip/)

Also, if your ISP maps your address to a URL (most do), you can get it this way:

Code:

URL=$(curl -s http://queryip.net/url/)

Emailing it to myself is, of course, an option. I did that one place, but email turned out to be more fragile than I would have guessed. I have to authenticate myself to my ISP, so I must store my email password on the remote, and there's a third party involved with a not-very-trivial protocol.

I was hoping this would be simpler. Actually, I have it working well enough to achieve my purposes, but after I started working on it, I decided to expand it to a general logging capability. But that's not working. But I don't really need that, so maybe I'll let well-enough alone.