I finally decided to nose dive into the blogging arena. I couldn’t find a better time to start writing my first post, the Christmas Holidays. During the festive holidays, or should I say, time-off, I had a relative of mine called me up, yet again, to configure his router for Dynamic DNS. After I couldnt find anything on the information highway, I decided to make this my first article.
Before we get started I’ll briefly describe what Dynamic DNS is all about, so here goes.
What Is Dynamic DNS?
Wikipedia has it as – “is a method, protocol, or network service that provides the capability for a networked device using the Internet Protocol Suite, such as an IP router or computer system, to notify a domain name server to change, in real time (ad-hoc), the active DNS configuration of its configured hostnames, addresses or other information stored in DNS.”
In simple words – It’s a technology which allows you to update your IP address (Public IP Address) automatically with a domain so that anyone on the outside world can still contact you via that domain or sub domain name if you
- Do not have a Static IP Address – an IP address which is assigned to you by your ISP and never changes.
- You want to host your own website, blog, email server, security systems etc.
Setting up the Linksys WRT54G Router
Before you get started on the router you will need to first setup a Dynamic DNS account with a provider. There are many free providers out there. The two listed with the Linksys router are (at the time of writing this article)
- DynDNS.org
- TZO.com
A few others I’ve tested are
- no-ip.com
- easydns.net
We’ll stick with DynDNS.org because they seem to be the most popular and also listed in the Linksys router. Navigate to dyndns.org to setup your account.
Step 1 – Go to dyndns.org and click on the “Create Account” link button.
Then fill out the necessary information and click on the “Create Account” button
You will then be taken to the “Account Created” page
You’ll then have to login to your email account (which you provided in the signup form) and click on the link to confirm the registration. This kind of secondary verification is normal to confirm that it really is you, trying to create an account and not no bots trying to create fake accounts.
After you’ve clicked on the “Confirm Registration” link in the email you’ll need to login to your new account at DynDNS.org and setup your account. Head on over to dyndns.org and login to your account. Then click on the “Services” menu item (1) and then click on the “Dynamic DNS” image button (2).
After clicking on the “Dynamic DNS” image button, you’ll be taken to another page, once there, click on the “Get Started” button. You will now see the following page
This is where you’ll setup your subdomain which will automatically be updated whenever your IP address changes. (1) Enter a hostname of your choice, in my case I used “saifkhan”. (2) Select a domain from the dropdown list. There are quite a few. To keep things simple I selected dyndns.org. The hostname will then be appended to the domain name, thus allowing anyone to reach you at yourhostname.dyndns.org, in my case, saifkhan.dyndns.org. (3) Enter your Public IP address. You can also click on the link just below that textbox (4) where it says “Use auto detected IP address xx.xx.xx.xx. (5) Click on the “Create Host” button to save your changes. Thats it! You’ve now successfully configured your Dynamic Domain Name (or I should say, Dynamic Sub Domain Name). You can now log out of DynDNS website.
Now it’s time to configure your Linksys router so that it can update DynDNS with your new public IP address whenever it changes. This will be done on Part 2 of this article which can ge found here.
