I have a linux machine set up on my home network behind a dsl router that is NATing my dsl connection. I currently have my router configured to send port 22 to my linux box which is set up with ssh.

Heres the catch, I am not willing to shell out $15 for a static IP address and every now and then the ip address changes on my dsl connection. I want to track what public ip address I have. I plan on writing a script to:

Find out what my public ip address is*
create a text file with that public ip address in it
upload that test file to a ftp service that I can access

*this is what I need help with. I am not sure what the best way to find it would be. In know I can go to http://checkip.dyndns.org/ and it will give it to me and I can parse it out. However, I am figuring that to be a lot of trouble. Is there a better way to do it?

Thanks.

Install lynx and ncftp (w/ ncftpput) then build this script

#!/bin/sh
#supply info
username=JoeUser
Password=ThePassWord
ftpserver=ftp.myserver.com

#dump and ftp
lynx -dump http://www.whatismyip.com > /tmp/myip.txt
ncftpput -u $username -p $password $ftpserver ./ /tmp/myip.txt

that looks like it will work. Is there a way to log messages to the messages file from a bash prompt? I don't want to be root so I can't write directly to the file.

Do not write directly to /var/log/messages - bad news. Instead, use the logger command.

For more info;
man logger

Cheers.