Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1MachineElf | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently on the search for a service to facilitate DDNS. Duck DNS seems popular, but I'm skeptical of things that are simply offered for free. What assurance do we have that Duck DNS is secure, or that it will not just disappear one day? The alternative that seems better to me is Namecheap with their API.

View on HN

I cobbled together a bash script that used the cloudflare API to update the A record when my IP changed. It worked well.

Prior to that i used https://freedns.afraid.org which is free if you are willing to share your domain (people can create subdomains that point to their IP) or you can pay to keep it private. It's been around for a very long time, so it's unlikely to vanish. It's a very good service.

+1 on Cloudflare’s API for this. You can generate an API key (per domain only, I think) and it’s a simple curl call from there.

And it works on their free account level! Maybe someday they’ll kill that, but they have a history of keeping features in free going.

they have a history of keeping features in free going.

Correct.

https://freedns.afraid.org has been running forever and a day, has thousands (?) of domain names donated for use, two APIs (v1 and v2), and the free tier is subsidized by paying premium members (premium gets extra features). Highly recommended.

Why does it matter if it just disappears one day if you are not paying for it anyways?

If it disappears how do you get a refund?

this comment hit me pretty hard. why do we expect longevity in the free open source world?

Because then you have a ticking time problem. Some automatic service might just silently start failing deep in your tech stack. And yes, you can monitor that. But then your monitoring software might fail, etc.

If you are having a serious (= where failures matter a lot) tech stack, use something that is paid and supported or host it yourself.

I think I see your point, however, what I'm saying is I'd rather pay for something in exchange for some semblance of availability and security guarantees.

That's ok. But I think for private projects something like this is fine. That's why I meant that even if it disappears it doesn't matter.

I would definitely not use something like this commercially.

I think any commercial use of, or reliance on, dynamic DNS is a terrible idea.

I’m using ddclient [0] with Google Domains. Pretty easy to set up on a raspberry pi.

[0] https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient

My router supports Route53, so I just pay the $0.50/month for them to host the domain. I don't foresee Route53 going away anytime soon.

How does your router support Route53? Does your router have a static IP address and you just created an entry in Route53 mapping a subdomain.example.com to the static IP of your router? DuckDNS is a Dynamic DNS and can work with common dynamic IPs... How do you update the entry in Route53 when the IP address of your router changes?

My router supports no-ip and other dyndns providers. I expect if that particular router supports Route 53 than it'll do the same: just update the entry in Route53.

OPNSense saves an AWS keypair. When it detects my IP changes, it updates a Route53 record using the AWS API. It’s one of the options alongside a bunch of other DDNS providers.

I went the API way but with Gandi, works like a charm!

Gandi is my registrar! Yes, I'm a fan. I may be mistaken, but something I worry about after trying Gandi's API for Let's Encrypt is the API keys provide permission for everything. I would love it if the permissions could be narrowed down to specific domains, records, and operations on them... AWS Route53 comes to mind, but my router (OPNsense) didn't have it available as an option. :(

Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but why not just pay for a domain and run a cronjob to update the IP in case it changes?

How long does it take to propagate the changed IP?

Depends on your TTL. For me 15 minutes.

Generally a few seconds from my experience with outside friends using services I've set up.

Anecdote: I am happily using DNS Made Easy (paid) with ‘ddclient’ for dynamic updates via their API

ddnss.de

Reply on news.ycombinator.com