Accessing Home PC - Part 3

This is a 6-part discussions designed to help maximize resources on your home PC.We will show you how to turn on home PC remotely, establish a secure tunnel, remote control home PC, or see your home webcam.Remember, there are always alternative, I’m here to share with you my experience.

Wake up home PC without knowing your home IP

Scenario: You have done 2 previous steps and feel good about it but, all of a sudden, you can’t turn on the home PC any more.  Oh, my ISP changed my assigned IP again….

Luckily, there are plenty of ways solving this issue from paying ISP a fixed IP address, install an IP updating client tool on one of your home PCs and leave it on all the time, or use the dynamic DNS on your router.  Please Google “dynamic DNS” to read some background about this (Wikipedia).  

We are going to talk about the 3rd option here.  This is a 3-tier setup process that you need to register a DDNS account, configure router, and setup client laptop to complete the setup.

Register a DDNS account

Your Actiontec MI424WR router supports dynamic DNS natively.  All you need is to sign up a free account with the provider such as http://dyndns.org or http://no-ip.com (Actiontec MI424WR router shows you a list of providers the router supports).   Write down the DNS name (never changed) you applied during the registration process.  You will also need the account name and password to configure in your router.

Configure your router

Login to your Actiontec MI424WR router and go to Advances/Dynamic DNS screen to add a new entry.  

• Host Name: is the DNS you applied with your DDNS provider
• Provider: I used no-ip.com as an example
• User Name: your account name with the DDNS provider
• Password: your password with the DDNS provider

That’s it.  From now on, a new IP is updated by your ISP the router will send an update request to your DDNS provider so you will always be up to date with your IP address.  You will be using the host name myhome.hopto.org instead of the static IP address.

Setting up Laptop

Now you can issue PING to find out your home IP using your DNS and use it in your WOLCMD.

• Ping myhome.hopto.org: to ping your DNS and return the IP address
• WOLCMD: use the IP in this command to wake up your home PC

Unfortunately the WOLCMD tool only takes IP address instead of a DNS so we have to PING the PC first to find out the IP address.   However, you can create a command line batch and name it like WOL.BAT on your desktop with a batch command script like:

ECHO OFF
SET MyIP=
FOR /f "delims=[] tokens=1-3" %%i in ('ping -n 1 myhome.hopto.org') DO (
  IF "Pinging myhome.hopto.org " EQU "%%i" SET MyIP=%%j
)
ECHO %MyIP%
WOLCMD 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx %MyIP% 255.255.255.255 10099

Save this script and you can just double click the icon on your desktop to wake up your home PC from now on.  This is why I like about the command line version of WOLCMD over the GUI version.

Next we will talk about how to copy files between your home PC and your other computers.