Slashdot Mirror
Dyn.com Ends Free Dynamic DNS
First time accepted submitter mkitchin (1285710) writes in with news about Dyn ending its free DNS service. "For the last 15 years, all of us at Dyn have taken pride in offering a free version of our Dynamic DNS Pro product. What was originally a product built for a small group of users has blossomed into an exciting technology used around the world. That is why with mixed emotions we announced the end of that free hostname program today, officially turning down on May 7th."
Then sign me up for a pay service! I love being canceled on!
A quick search reveals http://www.noip.com/, and I'm sure they'll be more. Anyway isn't this supposed to be a stopgap before IPV6 means we can all have permanent static IPS?!
Anyone have a recommended replacement service?
None of us know everything. Therefore we're all naïve.
I know it sucks to see something go from free to not free, but a while ago I upped by agreement with them from free service to their most basic level. For me its worth the $25 per year. Others may feel otherwise, and their may be cheaper solutions out there as well, but it works pretty well for me.
I also like that someone wrote an auto-update utility (ddclient in FreeBSD) that I can run on my webserver as a daemon to keep my records updated should my ISP change my address on me.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Dyn has been abandoning the free service for a while. Companies are responding to this.
The IP cams and routers I've bought in the past couple years (Foscam and ASUS) have rolled their own dynamic DNS service and built it in to their product. They use to just use Dyn until their customers started complaining saying Dyn is no longer free.
I have not needed Dyn's service in a while.
I made a donation back in the 90's so I still get my lifetime free vip account.
Other alternatives sell your e-mail address to spammers so beware! I'd use a junk e-mail account.
Looks like I'm going to My netgear router to tomato or dd-wrt
The current software has a dynamic dns setting, but it's a dropdown and Dyn DNS is the ONLY option. I hope they release a new firmware relaxing this restriction, but I have not seen any updates in a few years for my model.
Effectively, they are taking away functionality that I have already paid for. Sony did this when they made us choose between PSN (and effectively any internet communication) or Custom Operating System, changing the terms of our original purchase.
Thank god for open source. But, I wasn't looking forward to this side-quest. I'm sick of things I own ceasing to work just because some external entity wishes to make it so.
Dyn.com (the for-profit successor of dyndns.org) has been progressively making it harder to maintain your free address for the past 3 or 4 years. First, they made it so you had to update your DNS record once a month to avoid being cancelled (even if your IP address didn't change in that time), then they made it so you had to submit the update through their ad-infested web page, and I think they also increased the frequency that you had to do that. There are many alternatives which still provide a free service that is convenient to use, I'd have thought most users would have switched by now.
This has been a few years in the making -- DynDNS started killing free hostnames that failed to check in within 30 days last June (maybe before?). I suppose you could sign up again, but they also removed a variety of domain names you could choose from. I lost my long held domain with a ath.cx suffix due to forgetting to confirm my dyndns login info after a DDwrt update.
I moved to Hurricane Electric a few years back as my primary dynamic DNS. They'll host your DNS for a domain you own for free, including dynamic update support. he.net
Routers manufactured by D-Link come with their own free dynamic DNS service, which is basically farmed out to Dyn.com. I don't see any mention on the Dyn.com or D-Link websites that they're discontinuing this service, so presumably if you've got a D-Link router you can still create a free Dyn.com account with it.
I use changeip.com. They provide great, free service, and I don't have to constantly "renew" the service.
If you have a Static IP with my ISP. You can have a domain name in the style of *.plus.com Do any other ISP's offer this?
I've been using my dyn.com domain for probably ten years now. Long enough that I don't actually remember when I originally signed up for it.
Regrettably, they don't register the TLDs I use and it's not worth $25/year to keep a "something.ath.cx" domain.
It was nice while it lasted, though.
But dyn actually stopped sending the renewal emails, thus losing me my addresses, then turning out to have deleted those domains as available options for non-paying customers.
That's when I ended my relationship with them and jumped to noip.
After this though, I wonder how long util NOIP does the same.
Get a free .eu.org or .tk account, point it to cloudflare dns (also a free service) and point an A record to your own IP.
I have a free account from years and years ago. It still works as long as I visit a URL that they email once a month (of course, they deliberately make the URL unclickable, while there are other clickable URLs within the *same* email... seriously, guys, offer free or don't offer it, but don't be a dick about it)
What TFA doesn't make clear is whether they are ending the grandfathering of existing free accounts or ending the offering of new free accounts (something I thought they already did a few years ago). The wording they've used is ambiguous.
I'm in Asia. My ISP doesn't do static IPs anymore. I'm lucky I'm on one that isn't doing carrier-grade NAT, though I don't know how long that will last.
The service they provide is worth about £1 or £2 a year.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
The providers that you mentioned will sell you a cheap domain name, but only for the first year. Then they want to jack up the price if you want to keep it. If you're only using the name yourself then I guess just changing domains every year might be acceptable, but in my case I have a number of friends who all connect through my Teamspeak server for gaming and it is disruptive to try to get all of them to change their settings (some are extremely non-technical and don't respond to instructions to change an address well).
Looks like I'll try switching to an alternative free provider, at least until Dyndns buys them out or convinces them to start charging too.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
At the time of dialup there was an ecuse to not have as many IP adresses as there were customers. Now there will be at least as many IP adresses as there are customers for an ISP. So having a fixed IP would be no problem.
having a reversed DNS for your mail (on reqiuest) is also no a real issue.
Goin g from dynamic to fixed DNS for providers should not be a serious issue on a technical level.
However selling IP adresses is a very profitable business model. No investment (People need an IP adress anyway as they are already only 24/7) on the IP adresses. On the receiving end, just the billing system and you can ask almost anything.
When comparing prices between fixed and non fixed IP in Belgium, the average difference was about 50EUR per IP adress. This only looking at the speed of the connection. non-fixed would also receive webspace, email accounts and the like.
That is 50x12=600EUR per year for your IP without any additional investment on part of the ISP. When I asked several ISPs, they basically said: we get away with it so we do it.
One admitted that having a fixed IP would be cheaper in opperation.
Luckily I found a provider that has fixed IP and no limit for a reasonable price. Not the cheapest, but the best value for money for what I want.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
There is a little confusion here. Dynamic DNS means the domain record is constantly updated to point to the correct IP address. Its completely independent of domain registration. godaddy does not offer a dyndns service. Most dyndns services do not offer domains.
DynDNS is useful if you want to be able to always contact a box on a domain, but it's got a dynamic IP address - i.e. typically for running a server on a home box. I use it to ssh into home when I'm away, I just do ssh mydyndomain.org and don't need to worry about IP addresses.
I have had domains with godaddy in the past, but I've always used dyn.com as well.
It is possible to use a script to update your A record through your registrar's web interface, but this will break every time they update the site.
P.S. I recommend not using godaddy.
Moderated Usenet
If you have a Linode VPS, then you do have free Dynamic DNS. All you need is a script to update the relevant subdomain.
Here is a script that does it for an OpenWRT router.
Using Linode Dynamic DNS with OpenWRT
If you don't use OpenWRT, you can still use any Linux box behind the subdomain, but you need to setup a small "what is my IP" script outside your subdomain. For example, simple script like so will do the trick:
Now, you need to change the OpenWRT script above to contact the server that has the PHP script, and get the public IP address of the subdomain.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
If you have ever sold a business like this, there is usually a 'no-compete' type condition for many years, usually a decade.
That is all.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
And that computer can use any service you care to setup.
Why spend $25 when you can get an even better and likely shorter domain form something like godaddy or domain.com for about $8 a year for a .com?
The last time I checked, Go Daddy provided no API for a background service running on your server to update the zone file whenever the service notices that the server's IP address has changed. Zone files can be edited only through the web interface. With which registrar that provides such an API have you had a positive experience?
How does this effect me as Free For Life user of dyndns?
Because I still seem to be.
In practice, "life" will likely end up limited to the 90 days or 12 months or whatever for which the product is expressly warranted.
Saw this coming a long time ago (well at least 9 months ago). So...roll your own: http://warped.org/blog/2013/07...
-- How many sigs are as useless as this one?
I'm a Dyn.com customer of old so I got an email to tell me that the promise to be "always free" back then holds for me, even if not for newer customers.
But when I was looking for a more modern replacement, I was expecting to be able to set up a Dyn-compatible service for my old domains using an external Linux server. There doesn't seem to be anything easy for that.
What I'd like is a Linux package which you can install on a server, and have it provide Dyn-like updating, without me having to play with BIND and all sorts (I don't do nameserving, so it's no particular fuss to install a nameserver JUST for this purpose). I thought DNSMasq might do it, as it's so powerful it tends to do everything, but that doesn't seem to offer it.
And if it's Dyn.com compatible in the protocol it uses to accept reports from clients, it's just a matter of hacking in your IP instead of Dyn.com's. But I couldn't find anything that wasn't a case of "install this series of Perl scripts in such a way that they play with the internals of your existing, perfectly working BIND setup, and basically get called from web-requests with permissions enough to do just that".
Anyone know of some software that works like the server-side of Dyn.com so I could host my own DynDNS service for my home accounts using a static, external server?
I was pretty good about noticing the "renewal" emails, but I knew it was just a matter of time before either I missed an email, or they terminated free service.
I just bought a two year TLD from Namecheap, with WhoIsGuard service for $27 total. Not bad. There are a handful of DNS updater apps available for Namecheap, including a Chrome extension, so this should work out fine.
So long, DynDNS, it was a great ride while it lasted!
"Buy 'em out Boys!"
Nerds smash up Homer Simpson's office
"You don't think I got rich by *actually* buying people out did you?"
sry, first thing that came to mind...
Not a problem, I moved my free DNS services to No-IP a couple of years ago.
Differences between how you act when some one is watching, and how you act when no one is watching, define who you are
Just for convenience, I have been a paying customer of Dyn for a couple of years, now.
It is a sad end but it will not change my use of their services.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
I transitioned to their "premier" pay service a while ago so this doesn't affect me, though I still know a lot of folks who have been using their free service.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Then you should complain to the router vendor. Dynamic UPDATE and TSIG were
standardised over a decade ago to allow everyone to use the same protocol.
You should just be able to type in the update server's name if it isn't one of
the zone's nameservers. If it is then it shouldn't be needed.
nsupdate
server <servername>
key keyname <secret>
update delete hostname A
update add hostname 300 A 1.2.3.4
send
I host a personal website on my pi - after losing my free dyndns account I came up with this solution. It's ugly but it works for me...
I have an account with Dreamhost for my other sites. On Dreamhost I created a subdomain pi.mydomainname.com. My pi checks it's external ip address every 10 minutes - if it changes - it ftp's its new address to pi.mydomainname.com. If you browse over to pi.mydomainname.com there is an index.php that does a redirect to whatever the latest pi ip address is.
My address changed last weekend and the site is still up.
I use no-ip. Actually, they were having a sale a few months ago, so I threw them some money for a year. I don't use any of the fancy features, though it is pretty nice not getting the monthly nag email. Still, their free offering is fine, you just get a monthly nag email (which I'm sure dyn.com gave you something similar too).
As of today it looks like they've started implementing a new business strategy: sending spam e-mails to their former free account holders for webinars. I've closed my account and added dyn.com to my spam filter.