For quite some time, I’ve set up my office Internet router to use dynamic DNS so I can access my iMac from home and it was always working great. This evening, however, I can’t seem to connect to it – it doesn’t even respond to my ping commands. What’s wrong?

Telephone’s working, electricity is ok, why is my iMac not responding? Is there something wrong with Internet access, or is it the computer’s fault? I pondered for some time, when I open up Gmail and I noticed this:

I always have Gmail running as a Fluid app (so it doesn’t mix with my Safari windows) on the iMac, so when I log in to Gmail from any other place, it displays that little message informing me that Gmail is open from another computer. Voila, that’s my iMac’s IP address! I connected successfully to the computer using its IP address, so I guess dynamic DNS on the router is the culprit.

So when you need to connect to a remote computer and dynamic DNS fails, just open Gmail. (Just have Gmail open at all times, so you can leverage this trick if you’ll ever need to do so).