[Nottingham] importing domain to own host

[David Bottrill]

On Monday 10 April 2006 16:56, James Gibbon wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been using Vision Internet for my modest blog site, jamesgibbon.com,
> for the last two years - and although I've been perfectly happy with their
> service, I've decided that my own domestic webserver should be more than
> adequate for my hosting purposes. So, it's my intention to copy the content
> onto my own box, and host it there, instead of renewing in May.
>
> I believe that it's possible to use a registered domain name with a dynamic
> IP address (I have bog-standard domestic NTL broadband), by piggybacking
> off a dyndns.org subdomain. I already have two of those, which are already
> used with my webserver.
>
> Has anyone actually tried this or something similar? I don't really know
> what I'm doing :D
>
> Do I need to set up BIND on my own box?
>
> I assume that I need to renew domain name registration with Vision, but how
> can I associate it with my own server, instead of the server host at
> Vision?

I've been doing this for years, although recently I've moved my domain to a 
hosted Xen virtual server.

AFAIK you can't run an authoritative DNS on the dynamic IP i.e. you can't  run 
you own DNS. You will need to move your domain to a dynamic DNS provider, 
they will charge you a few 10's of pounds a year and may also offer other 
services, such as backup mail servers. I pay around $60 per year for DNS and 
backup email from www.noip.com and I can heartilly recommend them.

For this to work you will need a daemon running on one of your boxes, this 
will periodically connect to the provider so they can get an up to date 
record of your IP address. When they provide DNS lookup they deliberately 
give it a short time to live so your DNS doesn't hang around for too long in 
DNS caches without being refreshed, so should your IP change the world will 
know about it in a short time. 

Beware some dynamic DNS providers use HTTP for the daemon communication and if 
like me (NTL) your ISP uses transparent web caches the DNS will get the cache 
address rather than your real IP address so check the technical documentation 
before you make a decision. Some broadband routers have support for some 
dynamic DNS providers as does M0n0wall http://m0n0.ch/wall and Smoothwall 
www.smoothwall.org so you wont even need to run the Daemon on one of your 
boxes. Unfortunately neither  M0n0wall or Smoothwall support noip.com which 
is a shame, but no big deal as far as I'm concerned.

David

-- 
David Bottrill

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www.bottrill.org
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