Poor Man's DDNS

1

I’ve never bothered to set up DDNS. My home IP address tends to be pretty stable, but does change from time to time. Instead, (and long before I started playing with HA) I’ve set up what has been a pretty reliable alternative:

I have a few domains hosted at GoDaddy, and on one of them I’ve set up a page which does nothing but return the IP address of the remote host, and store that address in a text file on the GoDaddy server. I have a batch job running on an old laptop at home which calls that page a couple of times a day, so the text file always contains whatever my home IP is.

Other scripts on that server can read that text file. Links can be created dynamically to insert the “home” IP address, so I can access stuff on my network remotely. They can also detect whether I’m on my home network or not, and adjust the links accordingly. It’s almost like my own personal DNS.

At some point I’d like to set up the Raspberry Pi running HA to do the regular HTTP Get requests, instead of the laptop. I’m a real newbie at both HA and Linux though.

I feel like a lot more could be done with this sort of scheme, and maybe posting here will spark some good ideas in those who know HA better than I.

2

I can’t see any advantage over using a proper dynamic dns service, most of which even the poorest man can afford.

3

thank you for saying this. I wanted to but I thought I was the only one.

4

And there are free services.

It almost sounds like a DNS proxy or something. I don’t see the value yet other than a fun project.

5

Yes, exactly what I meant.

1 Like
6

Exactly. It was easy, interesting and avoided sharing all my traffic data with a Google-owned “free” DNS service. And it allowed me to do things a DNS couldn’t, like decide whether to present a link to an internal NAT address when I connected from home, or the (dynamic) external address when away.

I wasn’t suggesting it as a replacement for DNS, just a way to have local control and maybe do some interesting stuff.