DynDns.org... What happened?

[d-type]

Hi All,

For the past 3-odd years I've had a dynamic IP address and used dyndns.org to map to it.

It would appear now that dyndns have gone paid-only.

Has anyone experienced this? Anyone have a free alternative?

Cheers,

Phil

 

[DanP]

When I used dyndns it was always a payable service iirc.

Dan

 

[d-type]

Nope, deffo a freebie since 3 years ago.

I've had a hunt around and found something called no-ip.org, seems to do the same thing...and free

Let's see how long it lasts, and how much spam I now get

 

[dannyboy]

I have a dyndns address I've been using for ~ 3 years, and still using it quite happily without having to pay anything?

 

[karlcdoe]

yep, it was definitely free, I haven't used it for 2+ years though since my cable IP almost never changes.

 

[dannyboy]

Hi All,

For the past 3-odd years I've had a dynamic IP address and used dyndns.org to map to it.

It would appear now that dyndns have gone paid-only.

Has anyone experienced this? Anyone have a free alternative?

Cheers,

Phil

check this page http://www.dyndns.com/services/upgrades/freevspro.html

It says they're reducing the number of free hostnames per customer from 5 to 1. Other than that, nothing is really changing. Mine is still working quite happily for free anyway.

 

[trm]

As dannyboy says, as long as you keep your pre-change-of-service account active then your services remain the same. Let it lapse or sign-up as a new customer and you only get one IP and a restricted set of domain suffixes

 

[d-type]

I don't get it. For some reason the dyndns updater program that has been running on my PC for the past few years stopped working. I tried to re-install it and now it wants to give me a 30 day trial. Although that page link that dannyboy gave tells you that your old account should carry on working I can get nothing on their website that says anything other than free 30 day trial.

Oddly enough my dyndns still works, but there's no dyndns updater program on my PC now, so for how long? What happens if/when my IP changes?

Update: I had a look on their forum, lots of people with the same problem. Seems like they made an ar5e of changing their product offering. Oh well, no-ip seems to work OK. If only I could get their updater to work as a service, like it's supposed to...

d-type2011-12-18 18:16:50

 

[dannyboy]

Better to just configure the dyndns settings in your router (virtually all routers support it these days, even the wanky ISP-supplied ones).

That way you don't need a DynDNS client running on your PC, and if your IP changes, your PC doesn't need to be on for your IP to get updated.

 

[d-type]

Why didn't I think of that...

OK, I just did that, hit the Manual Update button in the router and after logging onto Dyndns and looking at my account, it appears to show it works

However, in the Router help page, it says it'll only do it if the IP address changes, which it doesn't very often, so surely the dyndns account will timeout after a couple of months no?

Actually, from reading the dyndns 30 day trial text, it looks like after 30 days it defaults to only 1 free name and carrys on working, which would probably do me anyway.

 

[d-type]

However, in the Router help page, it says it'll only do it if the IP address changes, which it doesn't very often, so surely the dyndns account will timeout after a couple of months no?

Seems that it does time out after 30 days as I got the reminder from No-IP (and dyndns) a few days ago that my account will expire if I don't go to their site and sign in.

I can't be hassled with setting up paid service accounts and all that, so I started fiddling around with some VBScript and cobbled together something to get my external IP address, stick it in a http redirect file and FTP it to an ISP's web space.

An hour later I had this code below dumped in my c: and a scheduled task to run it on a daily basis - not pretty but seems to work.

'

' Get the external IP address of this internet connection, add it to an index.htm redirect file and upload it to my ISP web server

'

' V1.0 -- 2012-01-21

'

SetupRedirect "http://automation.whatismyip.com/n09230945.asp", "C:index.htm"




Sub SetupRedirect( myURL, myPath )




' Standard housekeeping

Dim i, objFile, objFSO, objHTTP, objShell

Const ForReading = 1, ForWriting = 2, ForAppending = 8




' Create a File System Object

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")




' Create or open the target file

Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(MyPath, ForWriting, True)




' Write part 1 of the target file

objFile.WriteLine "<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV=" & Chr(34) & "refresh" & Chr(34) & " CONTENT=" & Chr(34) & "1;URL=http://"




' Create an HTTP object

Set objHTTP = CreateObject("WinHttp.WinHttpRequest.5.1")




' Download the specified URL

objHTTP.Open "GET", myURL, False

objHTTP.Send




' Write the downloaded byte stream to the target file

For i = 1 To LenB(objHTTP.ResponseBody)

objFile.Write Chr(AscB(MidB(objHTTP.ResponseBody, i, 1)))

Next




' Write part 3 of the target file

objFile.WriteLine "/pinball" & Chr(34) & "></HEAD><BODY></BODY></HTML>"




' Close the file

objFile.Close

Set objFile = Nothing




' FTP the file to the web

Set objShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

objShell.Run "c:windowssystem32ftp.exe -s:ftpscript.txt", , True




' Delete the temp file

objFSO.DeleteFile "c:index.htm"



End Sub

http://automation.whatismyip.com/n09230945.asp is handy, it gives back a plain text file page with your ip address in it, much easier than having to grep and pipe a page from whatsmyip.org.

Output file looks like this:

<HTML><HEAD><META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="1;URL=http://

123.456.789.123/pinball"></HEAD><BODY></BODY></HTML>

Now, going to that place on my ISP's web space automatically points it to my home PC web server. Blimey, I just replicated dyndns and no-ip's technical product in 1 hour - I'm gonna be rich!!!

Here's the ftpscript.txt file referred to in the file above:

open ftp.plus.net

bkeaton

PASSWORD_GOES_HERE

cd htdocs/pje/pinball/

put index.htm

quit

First time I've ever used VBScript, it's a piece of cake if you've done VBA before, although it's being superseded by Powershell for .net. That said, I only upgraded to WinXP about a year ago, so I'm fine with it

. Coding's fun, maybe I'll get a job doing that again someday...

D-T

d-type2012-01-22 13:46:05

 

[d-type]

And yes, I could have done it in about 5 lines with wget or curl and dos copy, but I started off with some other script and hacked it. It works.

D-T