﻿TrueIP Readme File
Version 2.1.0.0
Copyright 2019 HazteK Software. All Rights Reserved.

What is TrueIP?
===============

TrueIP is an application that runs in your system tray and reports in various
ways when your true, external IP address changes. It retrieves your external
address by connecting to a remote website that reports where the connection is
being made from. By default it points at http://myip.dnosmatic.com but can be
configured to point anywhere that reports the IP address in a plain text
format.

How to use TrueIP
=================

When your IP address changes, TrueIP can report it in the following ways:
E-mail, FTP, Execute a Command, Post to TrueIP Online, or pop up a notification

When TrueIP launches for the first time, you should see a window containing all
of your computer's IP address information. By default it does not do any
reporting other than displaying that information on your screen. In the window,
you will see a list of local addresses, you external address, your computer's
hostname, and if you have some advanced networking configured you may see 
aliases in the list.

From this window, you can manually refresh the external IP address or copy the
various information to your clipboard. That's about it. For the more useful
features, you will need to configure them in the options window. You can get
to the options window by right-clicking on the TrueIP icon in your system tray
and choosing Options from the menu.

Once in the options window, you will see some general settings on the left. The
options are intended to be self-explanatory, but I'll go over them quickly here
for posterity.

Minimize to the system tray at startup:
 This means it won't show the TrueIP window when the application launches. This
 is probably good to keep enabled unless you are troubleshooting an issue.
Run at Windows startup
 This launches the application at startup. It accomplishes this by adding an
 entry in the HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run registry key.
Suppress error message pop ups
 Sometimes you don't want users to see the pop ups if the application runs into
 an issue, e.g. in a Remote Support setting. This hides those messages.
Remember external IP address between restarts
 Some people like to know every time the application restarts, because that
 usually means the computer restarted. If you have this enabled, it won't
 send notifications unless the IP address changed since the last time it
 checked.
Check frequency
 This is how often to check to see if the IP address changed. Most modern ISPs
 don't refresh an IP address very often due to the way DHCP works. Setting it
 lower than a few minutes may piss off the web servers that are helping you
 retrieve your external IP address. Please be mindful of that.
Show external address/Copy external address on double-click
 When double clicking the TrueIP tray icon, it will do one of these two actions
Retrieve public IP address from
 This is a list of servers to check with to see what your external IP address
 is currently set to. By default it contains just one entry, which is usually
 enough to get started: http://myip.dnsomatic.com

On the right side of the options window is where the fun stuff is. The section
is called When my external IP changes... and is where you define what happens
when your IP changes. By default, none of these options is enabled. As of this
version of TrueIP, it can do the following things:

E-mail me - This sends an email to a recipient. Pretty obvious, eh?
Post it to my TrueIP account - You can sign up at https://www.trueip.us/ and 
 post updates to the site. It's helpful if you are trying to keep track of 
 multiple computers running TrueIP.
FTP it to a server - Lets you post a file containing the IP information to
 an FTP server.
Execute a command - Launch one or more programs locally on your computer.
Popup a tray notification - Just show a tray notification when the IP changes
Post to custom URL - Works with providers like Namecheap or any other dynamic
 DNS server that allows you to post data to update a hostname. Supports both
 POST and GET methods.

Each of these settings, except the popup one, has a corresponding button that
will open the extra settings for each method. The settings for each is fairly
self-explanatory as well. If you need help figuring one of them out, feel 
free to get in contact using the contact info at the end of this readme file.

Finally, you can also enable Logging in the application. If you don't really
want to send the information anywhere else, you can still log to a file
locally and check on it periodically. This log can be accessed by choosing the
option on the system icon's right-click menu.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me and
I'll try my best to respond as soon as possible.

Web: https://www.haztek-software.com/contact
Email: support@haztek-software.com
Twitter: @hazteksoftware

See the license.txt distributed with this package for details on licensing.
