Since I travel quite frequently, I end up carrying my little Sony VAIO with me. It's a pentium M900, which means that it works on the same level as a Pentium IV 1.6 Mhz, which isn't very fast compared to the machines you can buy on the street today.
Enter my server at home. It's an AMD 3000 running Windows XP, 2gb of RAM and 160gb Harddrive. I can run everything that I need in my lab, bar none. I have more memory than I need and this is a first!
So, in the interest of harnessing this great box, I decided to find a way to "logon" to the box without using Windows terminals server. I decided to go with VNC 4.0. But, irrespective of the software you use to connect, I still need the IP Address, and herein lies the problem.
Road Runner only provides dynamic IP addresses. So, rather than use DDNS, I decided to Integrate webMethods with my Router, query the router and retrieve the dynamically allocated IP address.
I did this with a simple flow service that calls loadDocument, which logs onto the status page of the router and returns the page as a string. I parse the string until I find the IP Address.
I ftp the IP address along with a timestamp to a web server that I can access with my Treo 600 or any browser to get the IP address. This service runs on a scheduler once per hour.
Once I have the IP, I can logon to the server, router, Integration Server, Workflow, Modeler or any other component that I have. I can also maintain or administer my Oracle 10g instance remotely as well.
I started and completed the integration in less than five minutes! Too bad webMethods can't use this for a customer testimonial!