Monitor Home IP Address Using Powershell with email Notify
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Many of you may need to monitor your home IP address due to services you are running or simply to know your WAN IP address in order to RDP into a workstation you have back home. ย The problem of course as we all know is most ISPs use DHCP in the residential market which presents a challenge keeping up with your IP address as these tend to change somewhat often.
In this post we want to consider a solution without using 3rd party utilities and only by using builtin Powershell functionality in Windows 7 as well as the Task Scheduler to run a process to check your IP address and then notify via email address or text message as your IP address changes.
In the Microsoft Script Center there is a really great script to be found here which using powershell allows you to grab your WAN IP address and then store this in a variable. ย Check it out here: ย https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Get-StaticPublic-IP-09d7695cย . ย You can use this script to find your WAN IP and then take the information in variable and use it to email you when the ip address changes. ย Here is how we can do that.
First
We pipe the output from the WAN IP address powershell script to a text file.
Second
We use another powershell script to get the contents of the piped out text file and comparing that with your current IP address that you know. ย If the IP address is the same, it won’t send the alert. ย However, if the IP addresses do not match, a notification email is send to recipient(s) of your choice.
Powershell script to read text file and email:
$SMTPServer = "smtp.gmail.com" $SMTPPort = "587" $Username = "[email protected]" $Password = "password" $ip = get-content c:\test.txt $to = "[email protected]" $cc = "@vtext.com" $subject = "New IP Address Detected" $body = "New IP Address '$ip'" $attachment = "C:\test.txt" $message = New-Object System.Net.Mail.MailMessage $message.subject = $subject $message.body = $body $message.to.add($to) $message.cc.add($cc) $message.from = $username $message.attachments.add($attachment) $smtp = New-Object System.Net.Mail.SmtpClient($SMTPServer, $SMTPPort); $smtp.EnableSSL = $true $smtp.Credentials = New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential($Username, $Password); if ($ip -ne "X.X.X.X") { $smtp.send($message) write-host "Mail Sent" }
In the above script, you replace of course the email address credentials as well as receipients. ย You can specify either ATT or Verizon email to text addresses also if you want to be alerted via text message as well. ย Also, replace the “X.X.X.X” with your current IP address. ย The script will run and if the results match what you think your IP is, it will not send an email. ย However, if they are different, you will receive the notification messages.
UPDATE – Take a look at this post for a little bit more logic added to the above script to minimize false positives.
Batch File
In order to run this script, we call both with a very simple batch file (contents below) which runs both powershell scripts and we can use to schedule using the built in Windows Task Scheduler. ย You can name the script anything you want, i.e. ipmail.bat.
C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -command .\Static-Ip.ps1" > c:\test.txt C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe -command .\sendmail.ps1"
Schedule
Simply schedule the above batch file using Task Scheduler in Windows to run as often as you would like to check your IP address, whether every 1 hour or even more often.
Might anyone have a copy of microsoft StaticPublic-IP-09d7695c ?
Seems microsoft misplaced .i.
https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Get-StaticPublic-IP-09d7695c
Rob