the Open Source advantage

HowTo: Dynamic DNS

General Information

Dynamic Domain Name Service (DDNS) Allows one to alias a static hostname to a dynamic IP address, such as a cable, dsl, or even dial-up connection.

This private service offered by codefix.net uses the dyndns2 protocol developed by DynDNS.org, enabling many freely available clients to work with our service.

Clients

A complete list of dyndns2 compatible clents is available at: http://www.dyndns.com/support/clients/

Unfortunately, most windows clients have hard-coded urls.
Fortunately, you can get around this by editing your hosts file:

Windows 95/98/Me c:\windows\hosts
Windows NT/2000/XP Pro c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Windows XP Home c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Add the following line:
216.168.142.140 members.dyndns.org

This will redirect members.dyndns.org --> codefix.net.

Technical Info

Here are the dyndns2 parameters and their status regarding the codefix.net service; any unsupported parameters are silently ignored:

Auth Type: Basic. This is identical to most ddns services.
URL: http://codefix.net/nic/update? It is important to ensure that the client uses this URL.
system: Ignored. This parameter is specific to the DynDNS service.
hostname: Supported: one or more fully qualified hostnames, seperated by a comma. Hostnames may contain an asterisk (e.g. *.codefix.net)
myip: Supported: IPv4 only.
wildcard: Ignored. Wildcard support is handled by hostname.
mx: Supported: MX must reolve to an A record.
backmx: Supported: YES sets mx preference to 20, otherwise defaults to 10.
offline: Supported: YES causes records to be removed for the supplied hostname.

If you want more detail, look here.