How did you solve the problem of getting a stable mapping from DNS name to IP address?
For me, that's the big challenge; all I have is home internet on a dynamic IP provided by one of the big cable monopolies in the US.
For me, that's the big challenge; all I have is home internet on a dynamic IP provided by one of the big cable monopolies in the US.
I know of only one ISP in the Netherlands that uses CGNAT and there you can ask support to fix it, which takes them 24 hours. I learned that the hard way when wanting to have a gaming night, hosting a factorio server in my student room. No gaming night for me, or so the ISP thought while rubbing their hands. It took me a bit but I eventually managed to proxy the UDP traffic somehow, not sure anymore if I used hole punching or somehow encapsulated it in TCP and reverse SSH tunneled or something. (Edit: on second thought, pretty sure I asked the other participants if they had IPv6 -- they did not -- and then proxied the traffic from my server via IPv6 using iptables. /edit)
We are quite fortunate with having had an early ISP community that managed to gobble up all the IP addresses we'd need for a good long while, and our population is relatively stable compared to other parts of the world. I know not everyone is this fortunate. (Hello ipv6...)
Even in a place like Germany, it seems one needs to be a business connection to get this service, it's simply not offered for consumers at all that I could find in some town in NRW. This is why I'm so happy the Netherlands has ISPs like Freedom (successor of XS4ALL) and Tweak who not only care about being cheap. Even if you don't use Tweak or Freedom, I feel like it keeps the local competition sharp.
- Setup public IP updating. You server runs a daemon that updates the DNS record automatically. You can do that with NameCheap. ($)
- You can pay 5$ to have a digital ocean droplet that acts as a reverse proxy that just forwards traffic to your real server. ($$)
- You can pay for "entreprise" service and get a static IP. ($$$)
You would run a program on your system which connects to Cloudflare. The traffic goes to Cloudflare first, and then gets forwarded to your system.
But if you want to be accessible to the outside world, you need to direct your traffic outside; I don't see a substantial difference between routing your traffic through Cloudflare, Comcast, Equinix, or any other major connectivity provider.
And I would mostly agree so long as you're the only one who has access to said data. There will always be "ISPs", of sorts, that your data needs to pass through; that's simply how the internet works.
The nitpick about Cloudflare is that they are starting to act as a gateway to the internet. Maybe you can turn their fronting off if they start giving you trouble, or maybe your registrar also runs behind Cloudflare. Anyway, bit of a philosophical discussion how much power to vest in one company.
The real trouble is that their main offering involves giving them the private keys to your traffic. I don't know if that's also the case with this Tunnel product, but at least for regular websites, then they process your actual data, as with the bank example (a colleague at said bank was not happy).
Try not to worry too much about what happens when your IP is reassigned before you can update the name.
import json
import requests
IP_API = 'https://api.ipify.org?format=json'
CF_API_KEY = # Cloudflare API Key
CF_EMAIL = # Cloudflare email address
ZONE_ID = # Zone ID
RECORD_ID = # Record ID for this DNS entry
resp = requests.get(IP_API)
ip = resp.json()['ip']
resp = requests.put(
'https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/{}/dns_records/{}'.format(
ZONE_ID, RECORD_ID),
json={
'type': 'A',
'name': 'jellyfin',
'content': ip,
'proxied': False
},
headers={
'X-Auth-Key': CF_API_KEY,
'X-Auth-Email': CF_EMAIL
})[0] https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/ddns/client
I technically have a dynamic IP, as the ISP also sells an upgrade to a guaranteed static IP which I don't pay for.
However, I've been getting assigned the same IP consistently since 2013. I used to use a dynamic DNS service to keep track of it but stopped doing that since it never changes.
P.S. - I pay for a static IP from my ISP. Don't count on that never changing either. I know this from experience.
Most nameservers provide a REST API for updating records so this is very easily done.
But before that I created a service for looking up my ip address and hosted it for free at fly [1]. Then I setup a script in cron to update my dns every 5min if it had changed.