IPLinkThru is software that continuously monitors your computer's Internet IP address. Whenever the address changes, IPLinkThru updates a redirect link at a fixed Internet location you specify (your "forwarding site"). This allows users to access the server on your computer via a static URL.

Here's how IPLinkThru works:

1. The first time you run IPLinkThru after installing it, you enter the FTP upload parameters of your forwarding site. Usually, your ISP account includes a small amount of free Web space. This is ideal for a forwarding site. Otherwise, there are many places on the Internet where you can obtain a free (usually small and slow) website. During the first run of IPLinkThru, you also enter a name for your redirect link file. All of the parameters are saved so you don't have to re-enter them on subsequent runs.

2. Every ten seconds, IPLinkThru looks for your computer's connection to the Internet (LAN connections are ignored), and whenever its Internet IP address changes, IPLinkThru updates the redirect link on your forwarding site. Thus, whenever your computer is running, users can get to it in a constant way via the redirect link on your forwarding site.

3. For example, say your ISP is Verizon. Your free personal webpage would have a URL like, members.verizon.net/~johnsmith. If during initial setup of IPLinkThru, you entered "johnswebsite" as the name of your redirect link file, users would get to your computer by entering the link, "http://members.verizon.net/~johnsmith/johnswebsite.html" in their Web browser. Of course, that URL is pretty long. If you wanted to shorten it, you could use a URL name translation service such as www.shorturl.com.

Additional Features

In addition to the redirect link, IPLinkThru also places on your forwarding site a .txt file that contains your computer's current IP address. This file is updated whenever the IP address changes. Also, IPLinkThru broadcasts a system-wide Windows message containing the current IP address each 10 seconds. These two features make it easier for you to develop your own specialized servers and clients. Such a specialized server could listen for socket connections, and, via a thread within the program, adapt to IP address changes. A client for the server could read the .txt file at your forwarding site to automatically route itself to your computer.