[Freedombox-discuss] http://politics.slashdot.org/story/11/07/18/0153204/Security-Consultants-Wa rn-About-PROTECT-IP-Act

[Wookey]

+++ Abhishek Dasgupta [2011-07-20 20:52 +0530]:
> On 20 July 2011 19:14,  <bertagaz at ptitcanardnoir.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 08:46:38AM -0400, James Vasile wrote:
> [...]
> >> Dynamic DNS run by a freedom loving group sounds great. I'd use it.  
> 
> Why not use dyndns/freeDNS for the time being? gnudip2.sourceforge.net
> is another option, though it does not seem to be maintained anymore.

Very sensible, but I was very surprised recently to find that there is
(apparently) no package to provide simple DynDNS server-side functionality. 

OpenWRT has a ddns package which is some scripts to deal with various
public HTTP-based DDNS systems, but only for the client end. However,
if you were wanting to run DDNS on your own server, there isn't some
standard simple infrastructure you can install with a server package
and a client package.

I had already knocked up my own fairly dim scheme, which just scps the
client IP to a file named after the client in a known dir on the
server, which then copies that into the DNS config file and runs the
DNS-update script. I was amazed to find that no-one has done this
properly, and that all exisiting solutions are HTTP-based (usually
HTTPS) and thus require configuring a web-server, usually to do SSL,
and the server-side part is not available code. This does provide a
nice human-centric interface, but it's a nice machine interface we
want as simple 'install and it'll just work' solution. 

Have I in fact just missed some standard way of doing this, or is
there in fact a hole that needs filling here? UNlike many of our other
problems this is not intrinsically difficult. A few naff shell scripts
make a perfectly functional solution. There are probbaly many ways to
make it more generally useful and flexible. 

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
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