Rick Macdonald grabbed a keyboard and wrote:
> [...]
> I only looked at a couple before deciding to use the free service from
> ASUS that is included with the router, so I don't know which of the
> above are actually free. The domain name is not pretty:
> [yourhostname].asuscomm.com, but that doesn't bother me for my usage.
> The biggest problem is that if I ever switch to another brand of modem,
> I have to suffer another change in service and domain name.
There *is* a clever (?) hack, of sorts, that can let you still use your
own registered domain with one of these other services that just give
you somehostname.them.com for free. I used this trick for years before
I signed up with DynDNS to use my domain name to point to my Linux box
at home. (I'm on a grandfathered plan with them, so I've got a free
domain name DDNS with them for life, but this trick should still work.)
The trick depends largely on how much control your registrar gives you
with your DNS records. The registrar I use lets me edit all records
associated with the domain.
Here's the example names:
mydomain.org
myhostname.someddns.com
The first is my domain name, and the second is the name being used by
the DDNS service. This should be obvious, but I wanted to be complete. :-)
So, you set up myhostname.someddns.com and get your updater program
running to keep your IP address information current with them. Now, go
to the registrar for your domain name. See if they allow you to modify
the DNS record for it (I would think that most of them do, but I have no
way to know for sure). Assuming that they do, what you want to do is
create a CNAME record for the domain - set a CNAME of mydomain.org that
points to myhostname.someddns.com.
Presto! Now when you try to access your home machine, you can simply
refer to mydomain.org and it will point you to the correct place. You
can also set up CNAME records for subdomains (whatever.mydomain.org) to
point to your DDNS hostname as well.
I never had any problems with SSH, Apache running on my machine, etc.,
while doing this (regardless of what the DDNS service was calling it, my
machine always internally identified itself by my domain name, so names
matched up).
I'm sorry if this is already well-known. I hadn't seen it mentioned, so
I figured I'd bring it up.
HTH.
--Dave
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