When I worked at CollabNet many moons ago, I used a laptop for my normal development but also used a desktop as a server for builds and testing things locally.

Since I worked from home, both were behind a router but I didn’t want to pony up money for a static IP so you never knew quite was the IP was if things were reconnected. Obviously this wasn’t a big deal when I was sitting at my desk home but became an issue when I was up at HQ in San Francisco.

My solution was to have a cron job run every hour on the server and compare its IP with the one it had an hour ago. If it changed, it emailed me so I would know.

I mention all of this because Jeremy Zawodny has done the same thing though he has made it much more Web 2.0-compliant by using Twitter.

I imagine I would do exactly that as well if I needed to right now.