HOWTO roll-my-own "dynamic dns" for small group intra-net
 

I have my own hosted web site and server.
My organization has a half-dozen folks and a couple of sites.
QUESTION: Does anyone know about a roll-your-own "package"
for doing dynamic DNS?

I'll settle for being able to securely connect to our own workstations without solving the connections from any node on the public internet.
Connections from the public internet can happen {much} later if ever.

I know there are commercial services that do this. On the surface
it seems pretty straight forward to accomplish the first 80%.

• workstation gets a dynamic IP address
• workstation connects to web address and deposits the details needed to permit someone to find it and make connections.
• web site provides details so the workstation can find others
• YES, there are lots of security issues

The remaining 20% seems to be tight security, automatic refresh, missing-man, and such.

Thanks,
~~~ 0;-Dan

From your description, this is a private/closed LAN with a small num of systems. What's wrong with static DNS? You can even use the DHCP server option to handout static IPs based on MAC addresses if you want to run a DNS server.

dnsmasq can serve your purpose.

DynDNS with PowerDNS
 

There is now another solution for DynDNS using PowerDNS and MySQL as a backend. It's just a small hack but it will work for personal usage. You can get the source code for the setup here: DynDNS with PowerDNS.

Actually what you may wish to have is your router with an external IP. A program runs that tells the name server of each ip change. Then the name server changes it's ip address to match. I used to use http://www.dyndns.com/services/dns/dyndns/ and it worked good. Free up to 18 clients.

If you have 20 dynamic ip's you may be wasting you ISP money.

As for secure connection you secure it a number of ways. Depends on how you want to authenticate it as to the method.


Might look at something like untanle.com's free product or some of the add on's. There are other linux based firewalls too.