Dynamic DNS Hosts

I just got an email that my Dyn is going to stop their free Dynamic DNS service in a month. Any other free options that anybody can recommend?

My primary use is to be able to remote access my Windows Media Center setup, so it's just a redirect through the dynamic DNS. Nothing fancy required, and I don't really care about fancy host names. I don't use it that often, so don't want to spend money on it if I don't have to.

I seem to remember noip.com being used by some.

MannishBoy wrote:

I seem to remember noip.com being used by some.

I haven't used one in a while, but that's the last one I used.

What I do is run my own DNS on a couple of VMs... you can often get VMs very cheaply if you look for deals on lowendbox.com. It's not free, but it's pretty cheap, and nobody can ever take it away from you.

Getting it set up is fairly involved, as you have to understand a fair bit about Linux and BIND. You need to generate an encryption key, and configure your DNS server to accept updates on certain names using that key. Then you load it on your firewall, and have it run a registration script whenever the IP changes. (which means you'll probably need a Unix-ish OS on your firewall.) This isn't easy, but once you've worked it out, it runs extremely well.

When my IP changes, which seems to happen every few weeks lately, my various hosted sites and servers are typically offline for less than a minute. The re-registration happens almost instantly, and then I have a 60-second timeout on the associated records in my DNS, so even if someone looked up the record immediately before the change, they'll only keep using the wrong address for one minute. And then, just in case, I have a cron job running every five minutes, which checks to be sure that the registered IP address matches the IP address on the firewall. So the absolute outside downtime is six minutes, typical downtime for someone who just connected to the old IP is thirty seconds, and people without one of my DNS addresses in their cache will usually be hitting the right place within about five seconds of the address change.

This was definitely quite laborious to get set up, but it's flawless now. I'd be happy to share my scripts and configuration if anyone's interested.

LouZiffer wrote:

I use https://freedns.afraid.org/

Seconding afraid.org.

Getting grandfathered into a lifetime custom domain with Dyn was one of my best "right time" Internet-based luckouts.