A while back, I posted about how I wanted to find an alternative to DNS Stuff. Since then, I haven’t found much to get excited about. In addition, I continue to get search traffic where people use terms like “free dnsstuff”, “dnsstuff alternative”, or “dnsstuff coupon code”. So, it seems that I’m not the only one that wants a real alternative to DNS Stuff.

Introducing DNS Yogi. My goal is to provide a set of tools that can compete with the quality of DNS Stuff while remaining free. Here is what I plan to launch the site with:

• record lookups (complete with tracking each step in the lookup chain and verifying consistent results)
• whois (both domain and IP)
• whohosts (a quick way of seeing where a site is hosted)
• reverse DNS (IP to hostname)
• spam database lookup
• ping
• abuse contact for domain

There are many other tools that I’m considering. Here are some of the other tool ideas that I’m thinking about launching with:

• traceroute
• show HTTP headers (both for person visiting site and for specific URL requests)
• geo location of IP
• DNS analysis to help you find and correct problems

One of the main focuses of my design is making it extremely easy to do lookups quickly and easily. This means that it will be easy to run queries by directly typing in a URL location and that doing lookups via Firefox’s keyword bookmarks will be extremely easy. For example, you can easily set up a bookmark so that you can simply type in “whois gaarai.com” to quickly pull up DNS Yogi and show the whois details of my domain. I’ll detail how to do this on the DNS Yogi site once it goes live.

It might interest some of you that I am building DNS Yogi completely from WordPress. That’s right, yet again, I’m using WordPress as a web application framework. This will be a great test of how flexible the WordPress system truly is.

Please check out the DNS Yogi site and let me know what you think. I want this to be a fantastic tool for everyone to use, so getting quality feedback on what people want and need is crucial.

I wanted to be able to access my home network from outside the home. My internet connection has a dynamic IP. This means that my home’s IP address on the web can change at any time. So the question is how do you connect to something that is constantly changing location?

The answer is easy, use a Dynamic DNS service. There are a variety of these services: No-IP, DynDNS, zoneedit, FreeDNS, etc. Each of these sites that I’ve listed offers free Dynamic DNS service.

So what is Dynamic DNS? It would probably be best to first define what DNS is and then what makes Dynamic DNS different.

DNS means Domain Name System. It is a way of turning a domain, such as gaarai.com, into an IP address that can be found on the internet.

In other words, without DNS, the domain name gaarai.com is meaningless. However with DNS, gaarai.com actually means 74.53.81.82, the current IP address for the server that hosts this site. It is actually this IP and not the domain name that your browser will connect to in order to get the website content.

This sounds good, but what does all this have to do with Dynamic DNS? Dynamic DNS is essentially the same as regular DNS except that it has an added feature. These services allow a computer from inside a home or office network to send a message to their servers and update the IP when the IP changes.

How does this work? It’s really simple and brilliant really. A program runs on one of the computers inside the network. Every so often, such as every minute to hour depending on setup, the program checks to see what IP the internet connection has. If the IP has changed since the last check, it tells the Dynamic DNS service to update the DNS record to point to the new IP address. And voila! You can now access your network.

For the rest of this post, I will be talking about DynDNS. Not that they are any better than the others, but it is who I chose to work with, thus who I have experience with.

I set up an account at DynDNS.com, logged in, clicked “Add Host Services”, selected a hostname (for example: myhomenetwork.selfip.com), clicked the “Use auto detected IP” link, and then clicked “Create Host”. This took less than five minutes to do and resulted in my very own address that I can use to access my home network. However, I still need to install the software or else my new hostname won’t update when my IP changes.

There are many, many different software packages that can be used to set up the Dynamic DNS service callback on one of your systems. I tried a number of them and found that ddclient was the easiest one to set up and basically requires no maintenance as it automatically starts up each time the computer is started.

I installed ddclient on my home Ubuntu system (Lumière), and installation could not be more simple. I simply loaded up a terminal and ran the following two commands:

After I pressed “y” to accept the new installation, I was promptly greeted by a wizard of sorts that helped me quickly configure the software. The developer did a terrific job of making this process extremely easy with one exception.

When I looked through the configuration file options, I found that a default configuration option will make this fail for most people. This option causes the software to look at the computer’s IP rather than the network’s internet IP. This means that the update process will not produce the desired result.

Furthermore, by default, the details are sent unencrypted. I’d rather use an SSL channel so that people don’t sniff my username and password details. There are also some other options that I’d like to configure, so let’s get started.

First, open the configuration file.

Here is what my conf file contained after the install:

My changed conf file looks like the following

My changes are marked in bold.

• The line starting with “use=web” tells ddclient to ask CheckIP by DynDNS what my network’s IP is.
• “ssl=yes” has ddclient use a secure connection to send updates to DynDNS.
• “daemon=300” tells ddclient how often to update in seconds. 300 seconds is 5 minutes. This is the default setting, but I put it here so you’d know how to easily change it.
• “syslog=yes” tells ddclient to log update results (note that it only logs when something has changed, not just each time it runs) to /var/log/syslog. Having this log not only helps keep track of how well the software is working, but can also be used to tell how often the IP changes, which I find interesting.

After making the change to the configuration file, ddclient needs to be restarted so that the changes take effect.

After I ran this, I checked my /var/log/syslog file and found the following:

Some of you may wonder what the value of this is. Some possible applications are:

• Connecting to one or more machines via SSH. This allows you to have complete access to your machine via the command line. It also allows you to have full access to your files on that system and to shared network resources.
• If you are running an email server out of your home/office, Dynamic DNS not only allows email to be properly routed to the mail server but also allows you to connect to it from outside.
• You can also now run a web server on your network and be able to access the content while away.
• There are many other reasons why people would want to take advantage of this service. It all depends on who you are and what you use your systems for.

I intend to create a tutorial or two talking about how to set all of this up since it requires changing router configuration, firewall setup on your system, and adding services to your system that you may not currently have. If there is a specific application that you’d like me to focus on first, please let me know in the comments.

As a web developer, I’m always having to work with DNS. Anyone who has dealt with DNS will tell you that caching is simultaneously a great thing and a horrible thing.

Today, I made a mistake with the IP address of a new host, and I needed to flush my DNS cache so that my machine would go and grab the new IP address. I hadn’t done this in Ubuntu before, so I had to figure it out. Fortunately, it’s really easy.

1. Load Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal)
2. Type in the following:
   sudo service networking restart
3. Press the Enter key
4. Put in your password

Done. Enjoy your newly flushed DNS cache.

If you ever need to work with DNS servers or domain management, you find tools that help you get an outside perspective of what is happening with DNS invaluable. Years ago I found DNSStuff and immediately fell in love. They have tons of tools that give a wealth of information. I configured some quick bookmarks in Firefox that made making specific requests more simple than doing a dig from a command line while returning more data than any of my system tools could possibly offer.

A little more than a year ago, DNSStuff changed from free to a paid service. Since I found their tools so valuable, paying a few dollars a month for the service was a small price to pay. In fact, I was happy to pay for the service and quickly purchased a subscription for a year.

Over time, things changed. They continued to change their site format resulting in me having to constantly change my quick bookmark formats. All of these changes were to force people to buy subscriptions, but why was I being affected since I was a paying member? About half the time that I would try to do a query, it would take me to a page with severely reduced tools with ads all over the place telling me to buy a subscription. It was annoying, but I dealt with it. Then the frustrations went up another notch when they divided the service into two different subscription models. Suddenly, tools that I used to access for free and then could continue to access since I paid for them were no longer available. Every time I’d accidentally try to request one of those tools with my quick bookmarks it would tell me to upgrade. Furthermore, the tools that I could still access with my paid subscription became littered with ads telling me to upgrade. Around this time I also started to receive frequent email ads telling me to upgrade my service to gain access to other features.

My subscription ran out a couple of months ago. I was faced with renewing my subscription or finding something else. I decided that despite the irritations that I would renew since the tools were really that good. Then came the shock, the prices had gone up. To access all the tools I had purchased (and eventually lost access to) a year ago would cost me around twice as much as before. Not only would I be paying more, the site that I would pay to access would be filled with ads and would constantly send me emails pestering me to purchase yet even more tools that they invent. That’s when I decided to ditch DNSStuff and find a DNSStuff alternative.

After quite a bit of searching around and trying different tools, I settled on Ip Tools. Frankly, their tools aren’t as robust as DNSStuff’s tools and don’t offer the wealth of information either; however, they are still (at this moment) free and perform a good enough service.

My desire is to one day build up a tool that is as good as what DNSStuff offerred without all the constant ads in my face, that I can use just as quickly as the original DNSStuff tools could be, and that wouldn’t leave me with a feeling of being ripped off. This tool will most likely be a personal tool and be available to some friends of mine. If I get enough interest though, I might make it more robust and make it a public service.

Have you been burned by DNSStuff? Share your story.