Your IP address is to your Internet connection what your phone number is to your telephone, except it tends to change all the time. That is fine for most people who only need to connect to other Internet locations. But if you run your own servers, others need to connect to you, and you need to keep your IP address from changing dynamically. One way to assure that is by keeping your DSL modem connected to your DSL provider. Additionally, however, your computer needs to keep "talking." Typically, people solve this problem by pinging some web site regularly. That works. Unfortunately, that also abuses the resources of that web site. KeepMyIP takes a different approach. Instead of pinging some third party, it sends a random DNS query to your ISP at random intervals ranging from 1 second to 10 minutes, with an average of around 5 minutes. This tells your ISP that your computer is currently active on the Internet. It does so very fast without involving any unrelated Internet sites. It also does it without wasting your computer memory and CPU cycles. KeepMyIP is written in assembly language, so it is very small and lightning fast. In between the queries it puts itself to sleep so it does not interfere with whatever your computer is doing. It runs silently in the background without ever popping any windows. If, for some reason, you need to send out queries more often than every five minutes, or so, you can run KeepMyIP more than once. Two copies will poll your ISP twice as often, three copies three times as often, etc. Normally, however, KeepMyIP starts one copy of itself as soon as your Windows boots up and keeps running until you shut down the system. Of course, if you run an Internet server, you should avoid shutting down your system, except for very brief periods of time (minutes). Otherwise, your servers are not running and neither is KeepMyIP, so your IP address may change. But if you keep your system up and running, you can keep your IP for a very long time. |
