For a long time now I've been using Dyn's free service DynDns. For those of you that don't understand what I'm talking about, most homes have DSL provided by one of the big names or cable modems provided by some of the same big names. I happen to have CenturyLink (used to be Qwest). With these services, your IP address changes periodically so it's hard to have a name linked to an IP address when it changes every time the provider decides they want to. At one time CenturyLink was changing my IP address a couple of times a day.
So there are a number of dynamic dns services out there that will update the various name servers on the internet when your IP address changes. Doing something like this saves you the extra fee for a static IP and you can still get to your home machine by some name or other. These services used to be free, but over time, they've started to charge for the service. Dyn just did this. Over the weekend I got an email telling me that my free account with them would be cancelled.
So, what to do? I simply signed up with a different service and changed the bookmark in my browser.
Now, a lot of you folk can't do it that easily. You may have distributed the name of your site or machine to friends and relatives and now you would have to let them know it changed. Or, perhaps wait until they try it and give you a call to see what happened.
Don't misunderstand, I don't mind paying for value. If they had said that they were going to charge $5 a year for this service I wouldn't have even thought about it, I would have just signed up and paid the five bucks. They wanted $25 a year (discounted the first year), and frankly, that's too much for such a simple thing as sending an update to the name servers that your IP address has changed. To be fair, they offer a number of other services and have a good reputation, but I don't need the other services. Perhaps someday when I have a huge corporation to worry about, I might consider them again. For now, my one little blog and one little computer will do just fine without them.
So, if you want to visit my home control and monitoring system, use this link <link>. Strangly, it took me about six minutes to get it working and another ten to find the software to keep it updated through IP address changes. That's about 1/10th the time it took me to set it up originally with DynDns.
Your control page does not appear to be updating. You might be working on it or there might be another issue. Then again, it could be my issue as well....
ReplyDeleteIt may not have been when you tried it. Recently, CenturyLink has been changing my IP address two times a day. And, just to add some insult to the inconvenience, they change it twice in a row in the evening. So, I guess that's really three times a day. The first time, they just expire the lease and it changes once. In the evening, they expire it twice within about 20 minutes. Really, really annoying.
ReplyDeleteThey did this a couple of years ago for about three months. I think someone in the (electronic) area is loading the network and they do this to break it up. Things like web cams can be a pain for the ISP, and they have some special tactics to deal with them.
I couldn't be me could it?