DynDNS has been a staple of DNS routing for years now. Routers have had support included in their firmware for so long you'd be hard pressed to find one without it. Gamers and small business owners have been using it for years to host servers for things like Teamspeak, Ventrillo, FTP or VNC access across the web. The free service was fine for 99.9% of the internet because you didn't need any of the services that the paid model offered. Dyn finally smartened up, first building in annoyances such as having to log in to your account once a month through the website to finally just killing off free service altogether. The alternatives such as NO-IP are following suit, adding annoyances and just making transparent service impossible. Whats Joe Average to do?
DuckDNS is a goofy named DNS server that is hosted on Amazon VPC and offers exactly what users want; simple integration. While setting it up via routers can be a bit problematic, gamers such as myself just want a simple solution. Their website, which can be logged in to with Twitter, Facebook or Google+, has some software solutions to update your IP. For Windows there is the standard background utility that constantly updates or a Powershell script and a VBS script that you can set up as a recurring task. None of these solutions are to my liking, unless you are on DSL or dialup (egads!) your IP will almost never change without you forcing it to do so. Also, allowing Powershell or VBS scripting through your firewall is a serious security risk.
I decided to create my own using AutoIt3, a simple shell scripting language that I use for many things. The program does exactly what I need it to do; tries to update your IP until it is successful or you click cancel, then terminates. Simple, easy and transparent like it should be.
The program is available here and the source code is included so you can modify it to your liking. It works by either hard coding your domain and token into the program or by adding them to the commandline. You could also add it as a recurring Windows task if you wish but a simple run at startup works for me. The program itself does not require internet access, it uses Internet Explorer to update so IE will require net access for this to work.
DuckDNS is a goofy named DNS server that is hosted on Amazon VPC and offers exactly what users want; simple integration. While setting it up via routers can be a bit problematic, gamers such as myself just want a simple solution. Their website, which can be logged in to with Twitter, Facebook or Google+, has some software solutions to update your IP. For Windows there is the standard background utility that constantly updates or a Powershell script and a VBS script that you can set up as a recurring task. None of these solutions are to my liking, unless you are on DSL or dialup (egads!) your IP will almost never change without you forcing it to do so. Also, allowing Powershell or VBS scripting through your firewall is a serious security risk.
I decided to create my own using AutoIt3, a simple shell scripting language that I use for many things. The program does exactly what I need it to do; tries to update your IP until it is successful or you click cancel, then terminates. Simple, easy and transparent like it should be.
The program is available here and the source code is included so you can modify it to your liking. It works by either hard coding your domain and token into the program or by adding them to the commandline. You could also add it as a recurring Windows task if you wish but a simple run at startup works for me. The program itself does not require internet access, it uses Internet Explorer to update so IE will require net access for this to work.
