I've got cable internet. Despite the rare outages, I'm reasonably satisfied ... the only annoying thing is that every once in a while my provider will change my publicly routeable address via DHCP. As you might imagine, this prevents me from being able to ssh from work to home, which I do a lot.
First half of the solution: A cron job that fires off every morning to email my IP address to my address at work at 6:00am:
/Users/me/scripts/getip | mail -s "my IP at home" myemail@work.comSecond half of the solution: Here's an AppleScript which I attach to a rule in Mail.app. For the rule's conditions, set the Subect field to match on a keyword like "sendmemyipaddress." You can use your own keyword, of course. In the Actions section, have it perform an AppleScript, and point it to a compiled copy of the following script:
on perform_mail_action(info)
set my_ip to (do shell script "/Users/me/scripts/getip")
set my_dest to "email@work.com"
set my_subj to "My IP at home"
tell application "Mail"
set selectedMessages to |SelectedMessages| of info
set theRule to |Rule| of info
repeat with eachMessage in selectedMessages
activate
GetURL ("mailto:" & my_dest & "?subject=" & my_subj ¬
& "&body=" & my_ip)
send outgoing message 1
end repeat
end tell
end perform_mail_action
The purpose behind this is to have a backup in case my provider changes my ip AFTER my mac has emailed my ip address to work -- I just have to send myself an email with the subject "sendmemyipaddress."
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030607094823255