Recently I have been receiving a lot of support requests stating that TrueIP is sending excessive emails or flip-flopping because the service is down. I've done a bit of digging, and it seems like the problem is tied to the http://myip.dnsomatic.com URL that is supplied by default with TrueIP. Some people are having issues with that service. I am not sure if they are being blocked or rate limited due to excessive checking, or if there is a real problem with the service. It is a 3rd party service that I have no control over. The solution for now seems to be to just switch to a different external IP address provider. There are quite a few out there that will work in place of the default one, here are a couple that I have tested and know work with the latest version of TrueIP:

• http://myexternalip.com/raw
• http://api.ipify.org/?format=plain
• http://ipecho.net/plain
• http://ifconfig.co/ip

There are many more available via a quick web search for external IP plain text, so if one of these doesn't work for you, it's possible another will. To change this setting, go into the main options for TrueIP and just change the section where you define the public IP address retrieval URL. I would highly recommend that you increase the check frequency as well. If you are checking it too often, servers will often rate-limit your connections and return failure responses. When TrueIP detects that, it assumes the IP changed because technically it changed to "service down" and so it triggers the emails/post/etc. accordingly.



If you are truly adventurous and have access to a web host that can host your own code, you can make your own external IP address tool like those listed above. Here is an example in PHP, but there are various web languages that you can do the same thing with. You literally just have to put this code in a .php file and access it:

<?php
echo $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
?>

Unfortunately, I can no longer provide this service directly, as I have in the past. It was abused to the point that my web host cut off my site and I had to disable the script to get back in good standing with them. I also had to increase my hosting service to a business class service, which is more expensive and definitely doesn't get covered by the meager ad revenue I generate from the site.

Hopefully this post is helpful for you and this will end your frustration with the myip.dnsomatic.com service. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to get in contact.