I’m looking to sign up for a free dynamic DNS service. I see that No-IP is recommended, but the “renew every 30 days” provision on their free tier looks like quite a hassle.
I have a Netgear Nighthawk R7000 router, which seems to have built-in support for No-IP and for DynDNS.org. While it appears there’s some kind of partnership between Netgear and No-IP that might be worth exploring, I can’t seem to register my router with them, as the previous owner (with whom I have no contact) seems to have already registered it.
I was able to assign the router to myself. I emailed Netgear tech support; they made sure I understood I wasn’t getting warranty coverage (I knew that), but they had me send a photo of the router with the SN sticker, and they immediately added it to my account. Yeah!
I followed the Netgear instructions for setting up Netgear DDNS, which automatically creates a No-IP account. I’m not entirely clear on how they work together, but I now have a xxxxxx.mynetgear.com address assigned to my dynamic IP.
I think…hope…that some partnership between Netgear and No-IP means that I don’t have to do the whole renew-every-month thing.
Does your router support freedns.afraid.org? That’s what I’ve been using for probably 14 years now. I can’t find the details on it but if I remember correctly to maintain your account with them all you need to do is login once every X months to ensure you’re still using the service. Not submit any renewal, just simply login. Note that API updates to your DNS record do not count as a login. From what I remember they will send a reminder email as you’re nearing the login requirement. I haven’t seen that in years for a couple reasons. First, I’ve set myself up a calendar reminder to login every 3 months which I know is below the requirement. Second, on one of my computers where I pretty much always have a browser up I keep a tab open to freedns.afraid.org. I believe the browser cookies have kept me logged in and I think this also counts as meeting the login requirement.
Plus, I can have a dynamic DNS name of someting.farted.net, which is fun.
I bought a cheap personal domain on Google (€12/Y) and solved all my dynamic DNS problems. Using the RESTful API provided by Google I’m able to update Google DNS records when my IP changes because my router, apart from the usual NoIP, DynDNS, etc. has a very useful “custom” dynamic DNS URL, which I used to trigger DNS IP change through Google APIs.
The router only has built-in support for the services I mentioned, but what I’m realizing now is that the more typical way to go about it might be to run the update service on a server (like the Storj server) so I wouldn’t be restricted by what the router explicitly supports. For now I think I’m happy with the Netgear / No-IP setup, but if/when I want more I will definitely take a look at afraid.org. Thanks for the tip!
The router automatically calls the API endpoint at every IP change, by replacing the placeholders with actual values. You must create a dynamic DNS record on your domain and grab username/password automatically generated by Google.
My domains are currently with namecheap. When my 3 years free dydns expires with 3cx at the end of next year I’ll probably use namecheap’s system. (3cx is a voip provider my employer used and I ran a VM to connect to their server. I happened to get free dydns as part of the deal but my employer has now moved away from using them so the dydns is the only reason to keep the vm running now.)
I’ve found out, that it might be the case, that AVM is sharing subnets behind their DDNS: I am far behind my expected earnings, that’s why I will try to switch my DDNS provider and hope that fixes it. Do you have other / better experiences with AVM?
What do you mean by this? AVM has nothing to do with your IP. You get your IP from your ISP, not from AVM. DDNS has nothing to do with routing. By using DDNS your traffic is not routed through that service. If you share an IP with other users, then your ISP uses CGNAT.
