form m_myip

The IP is a number which your computer receives when it connects to the internet. It is like the address of your home and will enable a packet of information to find it's target.

There are many of these address numbers in use on a computer, since the exchange of information does not only occur between the Inernet and your computer but also between other computers in a local network or other devices connected via TCP/IP (an Internet protocol). If you want to know: Under which IP do other computers outside my local network reach me, you can send a message to a server anywhere in the Internet which receives your call and your IP (otherwise, this machine could never answer you) and sends the IP back to you.

Right-click on the (hopefully) green I icon in the toolbar. and you open a form which calls a program on the the Homer server which replies by sending the IP of the calling computer. By the way, when you open the protocol (m_protocol) now, you will find the following line:

 

16/07/03 10:51:11 sending 'IP Request' to Homer Server 16 (bytes)

 

It tells you, that Tool&Task was sending a command to the Homer server and 16 bytes followed the call of the respective program on the homer server. These 16 bytes inform this program, which does a lot more than replying an IP, what to do now and an Identification for Tool&Task as the calling program since other Homer programs also connect to this server and might receive a different answer according to their identification.

 

Setup this program on your server

In case you have an Internet domain available and PHP (programming language to create dynamic websites) is installed, you may create a program e.g. request_ip.php in the root of this domain (e.g. C:\inetpub\wwwroot ...; there is often a file index.php or index.html) and insert 3 lines into this file:

 

<?php
die($_SERVER['REMOTE_HOST']);
?>

When this PHP program starts (because you are calling it from Tool&Task in a minute) PHP creates an array $_SERVER (many variables under one name) which includes 'REMOTE_HOST', the calling IP. The line will instruct the program to end its life (=die) after sending this IP as message back to the calling computer.

Copy the 3 lines to your clipbord, go to the internet root directory of your server. If you want, use Tool&Task - miscellaneous - open in editor (make sure, you have notepad++ installed) to create this file request_ip.php in the described directory and paste the tree lines froom your clipboard.

Go back now to the program you started (m_myip) and enter the URL to this file (HTTP://www.<the domain>/request_ip.php) into the empty text field and click the button test. Everything done correctly?

As a next step you download the PHP manual, read about the $_SERVER array and change the program request_ip.php to include whenever you find interresting. Tool&Task and the test button in m_myip is your testing evironment.

You will find out that Tool&Task does much more for your PHP/HTML project. If you start in this summer (2017), your progress will be much faster than our proceeding with the help screens.