I’ve been using DynDNS for over a decade, right when when we first got broadband at my house. Back then I’m not even sure we broke 1Mbps down. But with an always on connection, being able to get your IP address without remember the long string of #s was crucial.
About half a year ago, DynDNS sent out an email notifying that in order to keep the free service, we would have to log into our account every 30 days or else our account would expire. It was nice of them to send us reminders several days before the expiration or else I would never have remembered.
Anyway, they sent us an email this morning and posted on their blog: Why We Decided To Stop Offering Free Accounts
It’s hard to blame them when I’ve been leeching off this service for the past 15 years, but I don’t exactly need their pro features either.
So I’ve been looking for alternatives and found out that my ASUS router doesn’t support afraid.org. Here is the list of DDNS services that my ASUS router supports:
- asus.com
- dyndns.org
- tzo.com
- zoneedit.com
- dnsomatic.com
- tunnelbroker.net
- no-ip.com
While going through that list, I found out that DNS-O-Matic are by the same folks who own OpenDNS and was even more excited to discover that DNS-O-Matic can relay my IP address to a whole lot more DDNS services than my ASUS router. In fact, with DNS-O-Matic, I can now use afraid.org.
Once you’ve created your DNS-O-Matic account and verified your email address, adding services is pretty straight forward. If you’re using afraid.org, it’s going to prompt you to enter a key. The key is the string that follows update.php? in your update URL which you can find here.
If you’re using DNS-O-Matic with your ASUS router, here are the settings you should use:
- Host Name: all.dnsomatic.com
- User Name or E-mail Address: (use your username; email won’t work)
- Password or DDNS Key: (just your DNS-O-Matic password)
- Enable wildcard: No
Blank hostnames aren’t allowed and if you enter any other hostname, you get back the following error: Request error! Please try again.
According to DNS-O-Matic’s FAQ:
How do I update all my DNS-O-Matic services at once?
Leave the hostname parameter blank. Or, if your software client requires a hostname, send all.dnsomatic.com as the hostname.