Im sure this has been asked before i juat can’t find where it has been - Maybe need to work on how to search Lemmy better. But…
Id like to eventually self host some sevices that require external access. While I have IpV6 addresses my IPV4 is dynamic.
Whats the best free way to be able to point some domains/ subdomains I have to my external dynamic IP and keep it updated. Im running OpenWrt on my router. - So possibly should be posting there.
Free Dyndns services seem to be a bit crap. Do I need to pay for a VPS? (seems to defeat the point of self hosting)
I’ve used big names like ns1 and Cloudflare for free.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web HTTPS HTTP over SSL IP Internet Protocol SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #891 for this sub, first seen 27th Jul 2024, 19:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
deleted by creator
From where can you get a VPS for that price?
deleted by creator
Yeah maybe I need to consider this.
Many DNS providers have an API and are supported by various dynamicDNS clients. I use Cloudflare and the built in client on my Opnsense router.
OpenWRT should have a client too that supports a bunch of services.
I use TailScale and their free Personal plan.
Disclaimer though: I haven’t done much due diligence on it. It was easy to install when I first started self hosting with Umbrel and I use it so rarely that it’s good enough for my usage.
I want to be independent. My understanding is that Tail scale relies on a service they run or a endpoint you run on a VPS - Is that right?
Oh right, yeah you’re dependent on their service.
VPS with a tunnel between it and home services (Wireguard/Tailscale, etc)in my opinion is Best Way as it isolates your home gateway (no open ports, because you make outbound connections to your VPS), and let VPS handle Identity and Access Management
(Or an equivalent isolating architecture).
Alternatively, Tailscale has a Funnel feature which can route public traffic into your Tailscale network. Though I don’t love this approach, it does work for low-volume connections.
+1 for using Tailscale funnel Don’t use a lot of resources and easy to setup
Self hosting doesn’t mean you should host everything yourself at home, using a VPS you manage (so the data inside it is still yours) is also a viable option for selfhosting. I myself host some services at home and a few others in a VPS.
As for Dyndns, I’ve used a few providers over the years. DuckDNS is the one I’ve been using for 5 years or so and it’s not failed me once. Pretty happy with it.
Maybe you could have a duckdns pointing to your dynamic IP and your domains / subdomains with a CNAME pointing to the dyndns address?
Many registrars let you buy a domain and set up dynamic DNS for it within their system so you can own a domain and get dyndns on it.
Otherwise you could accomplish it with a VPS but you’d only need the smallest one available because it would just need to run nginx to forward to your home ip (and a small tool to update that IP when it changes). So you could probably get something for less than $5/mo.
FreeDNS works pretty well as long as you don’t need more than 5 DNS records.
Other free services I had good experiences with:
I use afraid.org to keep my dynamic dns pointed at my routers ip. With afraid.org dns you only need a curl statement scheduled on the open
dnswrt router to keep the dynamic ip updated.Afraid.org gives you subdomains on other people’s domains, who can decide to stop letting you use them at any moment.
Yeah, you don’t have to share yours if you don’t want to.
I was assuming that you don’t own a domain. If you do why would you use Afraid? There are lots of reliable DNS services to choose from and you can have interface and features that aren’t frozen in 1995.
I own a lot of domains. Why would I want to run my own DNS when I can use a simple uncomplicated system that is time proven and reliable. They could of course set it up with a fisher price interface for thumb suckers who need flash. What feature do you need beyond standard records and a simple dynamic feature? The price isn’t that bad either.
You don’t run your own DNS, they are services hosted by someone else, just like Afraid. The difference, on top of the interface, is that they support modern record types, they have redundant servers all over the world, there’s a team working on them instead of just one guy, they have APIs that can let you manage your many domains easier, they have zone backup and restore etc.
I’ve used Afraid too, back when I was starting out and didn’t know any better, but once I’ve seen some of the other services out there I’ve never looked back. You’ll never know what extra features you could want if your current service doesn’t offer you any.
You don’t think you can run your own DNS? Currently I’m using local bind server at work to filter using commercial blocklists. It forwards all windows domain queries to the local AD servers DNS ensuring all internal windows related domains function normally. The external DNS queries though goes through bind and doesn’t care about anything except the root servers. I have firewall rules in place that prevent anyone from using any other DNS. Even DNS over TLS traffic is diverted to my DNS or blocked. It doesn’t rely on anything or any other organization other than the root servers.
In the twenty something years I’ve used afraid.org for personal use I’ve had very little down time. I’ve tried other services many, many times and other than something like cloudflare there is no point in switching. If you don’t want to use it, don’t. It works just fine and you can’t match the price anywhere else. To give you a sense of how many years I’ve been doing my own DNS I set my first DNS server for a dial up ISP in 95.
Finally, what record types are you referring to not being supported?
what record types are you referring to not being supported?
AFAIK it only supports a small subset of all the types currently in use.
You can pay for dyndns service which should be more reliable than free ones. I don’t have any experience with those, so I can’t give any recommendations. What I’m running is that I use few of the free ones which are updated either from my router or from a linux VM and I’ve just pointed few easy to remember CNAME records from my own domain to those dynamic addresses. It’s not the best thing in the world, but my dynamic IP tends to be pretty static as it usually changes only when my own hardware is down for a longer period of time (few hours or so, so a longer power outage or a hardware maintenance gone wrong).
I’ve been using No-IP free plan for years without issues. Inputted the credentials to my routers DDNS client and then basically forgot about it. Free users need to confirm their account once a month via email but that’s just one click.
If your domain registrar happens to have an API to update DNS entries, you could implement DDNS yourself by writing a simple automated script to check the external IP (e.g. via ipify.org) and if it’s changed from the last check then call the API to update the DNS entries.
Yeah been using No-ip free but I worry that one day I will forget to confirm and ill ge cut-off.
No-IP
Don’t recommend that. There are plenty of better alternatives such as https://freedns.afraid.org/ and https://www.duckdns.org/ that aren’t run by predatory companies that may pull the plug like DynDNS did.
Sure. I’m not recommending anything, just stating what has worked for me. For simple use cases, I think most of the DDNS services are pretty much the same anyway and it’s easy to switch to an another one if one stops working for some reason.
There are two options, one is tunneling (e.g. tailscale, cloudfare tunnels, or a VPS either with special software or plain old SSH port forward constant connection). The other option, the most popular answer (I think, influenced by how yoy asked) is Dynamic DNS or DynDNS (e.g. duck, hurricane, freedns, etc.) this second one is like the classic solution.
deleted by creator
I have dyndns, have since they were 10$ a year, and I’ve gradually realized that my ISP changes my IP on average less than once a year…
Free Dyndns services seem to be a bit crap
Why do you say that? https://freedns.afraid.org/ and https://www.duckdns.org are very solid and if you’re looking for something more corporate even Cloudflare offers that service for free.
DuckDNS is great… but they have had some pretty major outages recently. No complaints, I know it’s an extremely valuable free service but it’s worth mentioning.
