Remote Potato \ DYN Email

[lucasbuck]

Wasn't sure if anyone else noticed the email, but thought I would pass it along. I got an email from DYN (which I use for remote potato) that you will have to start logging in once a month to keep your free account.I only use mine when I'm out of town, which isn't once a month, so I was glad I noticed. I'm assuming DYN is what most folks are using, I just followed one of the online guides that suggested it. If there's an alternative I'd be happy to know because I'll forget to keep up with the once a month thing.

[Scallica]

If there's an alternative I'd be happy to know because I'll forget to keep up with the once a month thing.

Noip.com will send you an email reminder to log in when your account is about to expire (every 30 days).

http://www.noip.com/services/managed_dn ... c_dns.html

[foxwood]

Unfortunately, dyn.com/dyndns.org has been "encouraging" a switch to paid subscriptions for some time - like you, I don't want to pay a monthly fee for a service that I only use a couple of times a year

If you're using your router to manage the dynamic DNS changes, then you may be limited to the dynamic DNS services that the router supports. Here's a list of some other choices: http://dnslookup.me/dynamic-dns/

[STC]

^ I've been keeping a couple of accounts going with them. They remain free as long as you keep them active (for now) but have been killing the inactive ones for a couple of years now.

[lucasbuck]

Ah, I thought it was something new they were doing. Thanks for the info. http://www.dnsdynamic.org/ looks like an alternative. I'll just how to figure out how to set it up, since all I really did before was follow an online guide for remote potato. I'm guessing it's just a matter of using another service.

[foxwood]

Ah, I thought it was something new they were doing. Thanks for the info. http://www.dnsdynamic.org/ looks like an alternative. I'll just how to figure out how to set it up, since all I really did before was follow an online guide for remote potato. I'm guessing it's just a matter of using another service.

Your router is the most logical place to put a Dynamic DNS updater, because it's always the first to know about a changed external IP address. But most routers only have a few pre-defined DynDNS providers to chose from, so if you want to use a different provider, you may have to install a client on your PC, and have it run at regular intervals.

By way of an emergency backup, you can run a simple VBScript to check your external IP address, and have it put a copy somewhere on the web that you can access. (If you have the Skydrive client installed, you should be able to copy a file to your Skydrive folder, and have it automatically synch to your Skydrive, but I haven't actually tried that).

If you save these 4 lines of code to a .vbs file, you can quickly display your external IP address - figuring out how to get it to somewhere that you can retrieve it when you're away from home is left as an exercise for the reader

Code: Select all

Set http = CreateObject("MSXML2.XMLHTTP.3.0")
http.Open "GET", "http://checkip.dyn.com/", False
http.Send
wscript.echo Mid(Left(http.responseText, http.getResponseHeader("Content-Length") -16), 57)

(That last line just strips out the HTML header and body tags from the response - the units are hard coded in the expectation that the page won't change much).

[lucasbuck]

Thanks for all the info!