[RESOLVED] Dynamic DNS? IPv6?

sneakyimp

My home office does not have a static IP. I want to make my Ubuntu machine accessible either via fixed IP (which will not change) or via Dynamic DNS.

I've heard some rumblings about IPv6 being allocated on the basis of MAC address or something like that. I'm wondering if I might be able to use an IPv6 address to access my machine without having to pay for some kind of dns service, but don't understand IPv6 well enough. I also suspect it doesn't really work this way.

If I must use DynamicDNS, I'd appreciate people's opinions on these dynamic dns providers. They vary in price from about 10-20 dollars annually and are all supported by my router firmware
DynDNS.org
freedns.afraid.org
ZoneEdit.com
NO-IP.com
3322.org
easyDNS.com
TZO.com
DynSIP.org

bradgrafelman

I personally use DynDNS.org; I've still got an account from back when they offered a free option. :p

sneakyimp

bradgrafelman;11009037 wrote:
I personally use DynDNS.org; I've still got an account from back when they offered a free option. :p

I got a free domain from no-ip.com but when I tried to create a ssl cert for it, they wouldn't approve the request. in retrospect, this is note entirely surprising. any thoughts on getting an SSL cert for such a domain?

bradgrafelman

sneakyimp;11009039 wrote:
any thoughts on getting an SSL cert for such a domain?

What type of domain? It would probably depend upon the rules of the provider. It doesn't matter if the IP address is dynamic.

Is this just for testing/personal uses? Unless you plan on dealing with financial information or anything of that nature, why not just use a self-signed cert?

EDIT: Example on the rules; from DynDNS' FAQ URL=http://www.dyndns.com/support/kb/sslcert.html#faqs-dynamic[/url]:

DynDNS.org wrote:
Do SSL Certificates work with dynamic IP addresses?

Yes. SSL Certificates are associated with the server and Common Name, not the IP address, so you may use SSL Certificates with our Dyn Standard DNS service and a dynamic IP address without a problem.

sneakyimp

I logged into my domain registrar after creating my CSR and requested a certificate for the domain I had registered through no-ip.com (foo.servebeer.com) . My registrar, before issuing the cert, contacts the domain administrators for servebeer.com, which is not me. I own several domains myself but they are all tied to various websites. I.e., they are "busy". I'm not familiar enough with DNS to understand how I might take a subdomain of one of my existing domains and have it provide Dynamic DNS for my home office.

This is for professional use -- not financial transactions but proprietary source code. I'm not sure if a self-signed cert is OK because I plan to host an SVN repository and am concerned the clients (like VisualSVN or AnkhSVN) might reject a self-signed cert and refuse to connect.

bradgrafelman

sneakyimp;11009043 wrote:
I'm not familiar enough with DNS to understand how I might take a subdomain of one of my existing domains and have it provide Dynamic DNS for my home office.

Ah, that is one avenue you might try to venture down. What you'd want to do is create a CNAME record on your existing domain. A CNAME, or canonical name, is basically like an alias. Say you've got sneaky.no-ip.com setup such that it always has an A/AAAA record for your dynamic IP; what you'd want to do is update your DNS zone file for servebeer.com by adding something like:

foo.servebeer.com.        CNAME  sneaky.no-ip.com.

sneakyimp

BG, thanks for your input. As it turns out, my SVN client is able to add an exception for my self-signed certificate.

The CNAME option seems very interesting. I may try that in the future.

bradgrafelman

sneakyimp;11009425 wrote:
As it turns out, my SVN client is able to add an exception for my self-signed certificate.

I suspected this would be the case (and with just about any SVN client, to be honest).

If nothing else, there's always the (hackish) workaround of tricking your computer into thinking that you are a trusted CA root authority allowed to generate certs, meaning your self-signed certs would appear to be originating from a source no different than places like VeriSign, etc.