I have a TCP/IP server that is meant to sit and accept messages from a GPS device. Internally it works, but is not receiving the messages. (This is to track a customer’s fleet.)
It seems clear to me that I need to expose a “real-world” IP address so that the GPS device can send me messages.
I have worked with TCP/IP quite a bit from a programming side, but really know nothing at all about setting up an address for the real work to communicate with. Can anyone point me to some resources on the subject? (Or tell me what needs to be done?)
Does your internet connection include a static IP address (or a range of them?) - if so, then you just need to configure your router to forward a specific external port to the server’s internal IP address. Most routers can be configured to do this.
If you don’t have a static IP address, then you can used a dynamic domain name service (such as dyndns.org) to maintiain a consistently-reachable external presence - this consists of a)setting up the dyndns account and b)configuring your router to update it with your current dynamically-assigned IP address on a schedule, then set up the router to forward the relevant external port to the server’s internal IP address.
Not all routers include dynamic domain name service update functionality.