Free Dynamic DNS? Preferably for my own domain name?

[Gilbo]

I checked out the big ones:
DynDNS
No IP
Zone Edit

I was wondering if it was possible to get free dynamic DNS service for your own domain name instead of one of their subdomains. Does anyone have an advice on this?

I suppose I could run my own DNS server at one of those subdomains and use it as the DNS for my domain. Do ISPs often block ports for DNS on their networks? I'm sure you guys can think of better ways to do this .

 

[ddrueding]

I've pointed david.tweakt.com (Name/DNS hosted at downdoggy.com, site hosted by me) to ddrueding.dyndns.org and it works quite well with the DynDNS client in my DSL modem.

 

[Gilbo]

So when people enter the domain name that you want to use for your site, david.tweakt.com, the lookup forwards them to david.dynds.com which gives them your dynamic IP address? And you can set this referal up with the company you registered the domain name with?

Forgive my ignorance. If I got it right that seems much simpler than the convolutions I was coming up with. I'm such a newb WRT web stuff.

 

[Mercutio]

There's such a thing as a PTR record on a DNS server. PTR records redirect only textual domain name to another, which can then be looked up on the appropriately authoritative DNS server for that domain.

That's what ddrueding is doing.

The only down side to doing that is when a user actually hits ddrueding's david.tweakt.com URL, their browser is going to show ddrueding.dyndns.org, which might be confusing for the 3% of users who pay any attention at all to the address bar.

 

[Mercutio]

Whoops. I meant a CNAME record. Duh.

 

[Gilbo]

Is there a free / simple way to accomplish the same thing without having the DynDNS URL show up?

Is there another way I should be going about this?

 

[MaxBurn]

DynDNS works OK, I have been using it for a long time now. They have a bunch of different suffix's to choose from and I chose ath.cx because it was the shortest.

 

[Howell]

I have used Custom DynDNS for years - I'm using it right now. This is what you need to use your own domain name. Merc is on some serious ATI crack, your DNS name shows up just like it would with any other DNS service. dnydns also seems to be the most widespread. It is preconfigured in smoothwall.

 

[Mercutio]

IIRC the custom dyndns sites are not free though.

I miss my donkey.