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2011-02-10

The Need

When I'm away from home, I often find it rather useful to connect to my home network. Due to the dynamic IP address assigned by my Internet Service Provider, I use a third-party service to map a domain name to my dynamic address. This scenario requires that a machine in my network notifies the third-party service of network address changes; and a script to do this was fairly easy to write.

The Preparation

The first thing I need to do was create an account with a dynamic IP Domain Name Service provider. Previously I had use http://dyndns.com but their service has been intermittent for the last few days so I though a switch to http://no-ip.com was in order.

Aside from providing Dynamic DNS, No-IP provides software allowing Linux, Macintosh, and Windows computer users to easily update their dynamic address information. Even more importantly, No-IP provides an API for programmers to utilize when writing their own software to update address information.

The Script

Honestly, this could be done with a single line curl command, but that wouldn't be fun and it wouldn't help me learn Ruby. Enter The Ruby

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'open-uri'

#set up some variables
u = "MYUSERNAME"
p = "MyPaSsWoRd"
h = "my.hostname.com"

url = "https://dynupdate.no-ip.com/nic/update?hostname=#{h}"

#open the url
f = open(url,
  "User-Agent" => "Jezra's No-IP Update Script",
  :http_basic_authentication => [u,p]
)

#output the return data
puts f.read()

This script is now happily running on my miniserver at 4 hour intervals.

The big take away here for me, was learning how to use open() from the open-uri module to set the User-Agent of a request as well as utilizing http basic authentication.

One More Thing

Since I'm learning Ruby, and since I learn by doing, I force myself to write (semi)useful utilities for everyday task, like creating a password for my No-IP account. Instead of just coming up with something I'll remember, like 1 2 3 4 5, I decided to write a string generator. woohoo!

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

def help()
  puts "--Hey, you are doing it wrong--
#{$0} requires a numeric argument 
examples:
# create a 20 character string
#{$0} 20
# create a 10 character string
#{$0} 10

"
end

#what chars do we have to pick from?
chars = "!@$%^*_+=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789"

#get the first argument as an integer
num = ARGV[0].to_i

#the num better exist, and it better not be zero!
if num.nil? or num.zero?
  help()
  exit()
end

charslen = chars.length
string  = ''
(1..num).each do 
  char = chars[ rand(charslen) ]
  string << char
end

puts string

Sweet! Now quit reading, and go learn something new.

updating my dynamic IP DNS information with Ruby from jezra.net
Comments
2011-02-11 jamba:
pretty cool. how are you liking ruby so far?
2011-02-11 jezra:
I dig it. The standard library comes with buckets of useful modules and I *seem* to get what I need done fairly quickly
2011-02-12 James:
Hey, if you're digging Ruby you might check out http://www.sinatrarb.com/ It's a pretty sweet DSL for Ruby web development. I tend to use it for simple API stuff.
2011-02-12 jezra:
I already have and I plan on using sinatra and thin server to add a web interface on my next project
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