Tracking my home IP from anywhere on the internet?

Interesting question. Since you wish to avoid DNS services, I guess it would be fairly easy to knock up a script/batch file to check the current IP address and then to send a note of it to a foreign server via ssh/scp/rsync when it changes.

You can get your WAN IP address returned to you thus:

wget -q -O - checkip.dyndns.org | sed -e 's/[^[:digit:]|.]//g'

It would be easy to have this end up in a variable or file and then you can check for changes and trigger a report as necessary.

This has already been covered elsewhere so if you don't want to reinvent the wheel, have a look here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-526176.html

Edit: Darn, I see you just added that you are using Windows!!!

Edit 2: Much as I hate just linking - there is a DOS/cmd-based solution to the problem here that uses DOS versions of curl and blat (to send an email):

http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1988422

The oldest and probably most reliable way to bind a dynamic (or any kind) of IP to a domain name is DynDNS. You have clients for almost any operating system, and once it's set up, it will run for years without you noticing anything.

You might be able to schedule your client machine (Windows 7?) to ftp or ssh to your server using a fake username and password every hour. If you use a unique username, you can track it in your server log files.

I have a Linux ssh server. The /var/log/auth.log file shows entries like this for failed login attempts:

Feb 11 14:51:27 hostname sshd[3864]: Failed password for invalid user alias from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx port 28708 ssh2

Which shows the username of the attempted login and the IP address.

If your Windows 7 system got stolen, there is no danger of them getting the password for your server since your using fake credentials. The failed login attempt leaves just enough information on the server for you to be able to track your client system (unique username and the IP address where it came from).

You can use the Windows Scheduler but I would personally use the "at" command since most people don't know about it.