RIP Dyn Dynamic DNS :'( Oracle to end Dyn-asty by axing freshly gobbled services, shoving customers into its cloud Oracle is sharpening its ax for the Dyn networking biz it acquired in 2016, with plans to slash jobs and switch off services. Big Red on Tuesday confirmed it will tempt its commercial Dyn customers onto its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service, where possible, and pull the plug on Dyn enterprise services on May 31, 2020 …
That's fine if you have a static IP to point to. I have had my own hostnames for lots of years now, but aside from my sites intended for public use (which are properly hosted, have dedicated IPs, and for which I don't use Dyn), I don't.
I've been looking at NoIP, but I'm also considering setting up my own Dynamic IP service to run from one of my hosted installations. That way I can be sure that my service won't be sold off and that it's as secure as is possible.
I've been looking at NoIP, but I'm also considering setting up my own Dynamic IP service to run from one of my hosted installations. That way I can be sure that my service won't be sold off and that it's as secure as is possible.
I wrote a script that sits on a machine linked to a Mega account. All it does is run every hour or two (might be 4 hourly) and updates a log file with the system's outside IP address.
This is on one of my elderly rellie's machines so all I need is a link to the same Mega account and I can get into their systems despite a non-gauranteed IP (this was done before I built my own cloud server)
I'm sure you could figure a way to make use of this idea, and have it as an include into your hosts file (or other suitable) so you can point your own domain name to the appropriate IP (how often is hosts checked anyway? Sure you can figure some way so if the file changes the system updates it's DNS record)
I'd show you the code but trying to format it - I'm stuck in a recraptcha nightmare (El Reg PLEASE GET RID OF THAT FUCKING NIGHTMARE!) and it's making it much of a pain to try. I'll revisit this tomorrow sometime and post the core of the code, but basically :
It checks for a log file, if found reads in the last line to get the last IP address. It gets the current IP by contacting opendns using this line :
myip="$(dig +short myip.opendns.com @resolver1.opendns.com)"
(I got this from https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-find-my-public-ip-address-from-command-line-on-a-linux/)
Compares "myip" with the old entry, and if there's a difference it adds a new line to the log with the new IP.
If I was using it with a hosts file (etc), I'd probably just overwrite the included file (does /etc/hosts handle #include-type stuff?) each run, but I might find a way to keep the IP in RAM (using the Linux/bash equiv to the old DOS "SET ENV" command to set 'environment variables' - assuming there is one?) and only change the file if there's a new IP.
Now to fight my way through the recraptcha nightmare again, and fuck off away from El Reg and find something else to read for the night. Suggest a place to drop the code (or ask someone at El Reg to pass on your details) if you want to see the full thing. I'd love to post it on El Reg but recraptcha got it's mits on my system (accidentally visited El Reg with google.co.nz having JS allowed :( ). so posting anything let alone trying to nicely format code is a nightmare.
Night all, see you tomorrow.
(PS try http://freedns.afraid.org/ - I've had something tucked away with them for ages)
Spoiler alert: there really aren't any good ones.
Well, there used to be some good ones until microsoft used a court order to shut them down. Well, maybe not shutdown, but sure did damage their reputation. I spent the following many months trying to convince my registrar to allow me to get rid of the glue from the botched microsoft court order. Using a NoIP entry as glue was a bad idea.
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Re: Microsoft court order
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/01/microsoft_takes_over_noip_domains_to_block_malware_marketing/
I note that Draytek back in 2017 introduced a free Dynamic DNS service for their customers, so clearly there is a need and demand. Not had to use it so no idea as to its reliability etc.
I also note that their router settings menu contains a handy list of providers, which might be helpful in drawing up a shortlist. I supect other vendors equipment will have similar lists.
Just because raspberrypi.org seem to be happy with it, and they seem like a bunch of Mythic Beasts who include a Dynamic DNS service with registrations, so sort of free-ish.
M.
Apologies, missing ". The above should read:
...and they seem like a bunch of fun people, my last couple of domains were registered with Mythic Beasts who... etc.
M.
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PS - Now I remember why I dropped noip. The free service required annual verification that you still existed. No big deal. Then it dropped to three months. Then one month. Then their email started getting flagged as spam and missed. After the third time of missing the verification email and having to go through the full reestablishment process I decided to move to a paid domain. Google had just launched their domain service which was cheaper than anything else and included dynamic dns so that is what I ended up doing. Mind this is for a single personal home domain. No idea how Google would do for a business.
Have them set up as nameservers for $DOMAIN, then run a little script on home Linux box that uses their API to periodically update a record to whatever my public IP is at that time.
Seems to work well enough though I haven't hammered it over the years. That may change if I ever get my Plex mega project off the ground.
I guess it's well past time to start looking for a replacement service.
I used dyndns for yonks. I used the free service for many years, and then the cheapest paid dynamic service for the last 5 years or so before they shut that down. When researching replacements, I narrowed it down to noip and dynu. I more-or-less flipped a coin and chose dynu, and I have been quite happy with it. The free service doesn't require monthly renewals, and everything "just works". I'm thinking about becoming a paying "member" for a few months as a way to show my appreciation even though I have no need for any of the extras you get for the money.
The only thing I use it for is my mom's PC, I have her router update a DDNS hostname with her IP so if she has problems I can remote desktop in to it. Figures that Oracle would drop something like that which costs them almost nothing to run because they can't charge for it!
Yes, with next to no warning.
Myself, I'd have thrown them a few shekels a month to keep my DYN address alive, but I long since moved to an ISP that offers a block of real static IPs. For other persons, who may wish to stick with a dynamic IP... there are other solutions
Ah, so it is your mum that is causing the emergency lights in the Microsoft hotroom?
Remote desktop in? No! Just no!!
Try TeamViewer (free for personal use) or a plethora of other remote support tools. But please, just don't put RDP on the open Internet. It's a bad ideaTM
>But please, just don't put RDP on the open Internet. It's a bad idea
Ran an experiment at the in-laws enabled RDP on the Virgin router (using the standard port) within a couple of minutes the PC was getting flooded with inbound RDP requests, moved to a non-standard port and things did go quiet. Decided best solution was to set up a router-to-router VPN connection over which I could use RDP...
Whilst router-based DDNS is a simple no fuss solution, for reasons now forgotten (I was probably experimenting - exploring solutions that would work with laptops) I used a scheduled job to run a Curl script to send me an email when my parents IP address changes, also I configured a BGinfo icon which parents can click on to run the Curl script and display their current public address. Aside: if they can't login then it is unlikely that I will be able to fix their problem remotely.
I'm moving to them as well, later than I would have hoped since I only just (accidentally auto-)paid for another two years of Dyn (bad reminder and credential management on my part).
FreeDNS looks like the sort of operation that is ideologically opposed to selling out, and will continue operations as-is for as long as possible.
afraid are scary if you want to publicise your site. IIRC, they allow / encourage unrelated sub-domains,
I.e. john Smith signs up for johnsmith.linuxgeek.afraid.org and then Bill likes that and signs up for bill.johnsmith.linuxgeek.afraid.org and then someone else signs up for everyone.bill.johnsmith.linuxgeek.afraid.org and points it at their stash of pirated videos... John Smith then might have to answer lots of lawyer-questions about a site he has no control of.
You should have received an email telling you that your service is going to continue as is. There's a few people in the Slashdot comments who were on the lifetime membership that did.
It reads as follows.
Dear Customer,
Since Oracle acquired Dyn in 2016 and subsequently acquired Zenedge. The engineering teams have been working diligently to integrate Dyn’s products and network into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. A majority of Dyn products have now been integrated and upgraded on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Accordingly, DynDNS Pro/Remote Access is decoupling from the Dyn brand and business unit this summer, and will remain a business unit within Oracle.
Your organization has the right to access and use DynDNS Pro/Remote Access. This product will continue to be available from Oracle without any disruption of service and no action is required on your part at this time.
Additional Resources
Blog Post
We look forward to supporting you on our new platform.
Yep. I was one of the early Dyn donators back in the day, and got one of those emails. Now, you may choose to interpret that chunk of corp-speak as meaning your service will continue. OTOH, if you go over to https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/dyn/technologies/ecommerce-customer-faq.html, you will find:
Q: I was an early free Dyn user and donator and had historically received no-cost services for life. Why do I have to pay?
A: We truly appreciate your support throughout the years. While we are discontinuing the availability of services received at no-cost, you may be surprised by how affordable the DNS service is within OCI along with outstanding capabilities with this service. If you are interested in moving to a new provider, here is an article on the 10 best free DNS services to help you choose: https://www.keycdn.com/blog/best-free-dnshosting-providers
Now, this is Oracle. Given a choice between a vague message that might mean nothing will change, or something more concrete indicating that you will now have to pay (knowing Oracle, through the nose) to use their 'outstanding' (which, translating Oracle-speak, probably means 'awful') service, I know which I'm believing.
>Now, this is Oracle. Given a choice between a vague message that might mean nothing will change
They didn't say nothing will change for those who receive the no-cost service.
I suspect the free service was minimally defined, so expect Oracle to reduce it to the minimum. Remember Vodafone decided that email Demon provided as a standard part of their broadband package was a free (non-contractual) add-on and thus could be discontinued.
Hence I would take the hint.
EveryDNS donators were given lifetime free subscriptions to DynDNS Standard DNS when that was integrated into DynDNS. Those seems to be the main ones affected.
I guess it is time to migrate to something else... (My main domain has a paid Standard DNS, several secondary domains came over with free lifetime stuff from EveryDNS...) I kind of hope I can get a refund for the time I prepaid on the main domain - I would prefer not to agree to a Oracle TOS, since I would not trust them not to have some kind of clause that can cost you millions in there after some kind of audit that you are forced to agree to...
Accordingly, DynDNS Pro/Remote Access is decoupling from the Dyn brand and business unit this summer, and will remain a business unit within Oracle.
Your organization has the right to access and use DynDNS Pro/Remote Access. This product will continue to be available from Oracle without any disruption of service and no action is required on your part at this time.
I have been paying customer of the Pro service from the days since they stopped the free service (not to mention the constant need to "yes, I'd like to keep the service" for the free one was getting annoying) and have been happy with it and the price was not unreasonable. Bonus was that just about any piece of kit supported dyndns out of the box.
Given it is Oracle I have no trust in that statement that it will continue as is, or that they don't try to start hike up the prices, so I'll need to check my renewal date and ensure I have found an alternative provider (or I could just set up my own in hosted VM that I use for VPN) as I do not wish to give Larry any money nor do I have confidence in the continuation of the service.
Never tried any of their free stuff.
Certainly not happy about this myself. Sent them a scathing email this morning after I got the notice from Oracle(so far no response - I did compliment them in that they have run an awesome service over the past decade, I think really the only SaaS offering that has been pretty much flawless in operation).
Their migration FAQ is totally inadequate and incompetent(they say if you can't live with a DNS outage then wait till August when they hope to have a migration tool). I also got in contact with UltraDNS to see about moving services there instead. They also seem to assume that customers have registered their domains with Oracle cloud(who would register their domains with a cloud provider??? especially enterprise customers like Dyn has???) already. If not then of course have to go and manually update the dozens to hundreds of domains customers have to point to the new name servers.
The fact that they even show a process for migration which involves an outage to DNS services is just absurd. I mean it is not difficult to move DNS providers and not have an outage. But they literally tell you to delete the zone from Dynect before changing the domain registration to point to the new name servers. That's just beyond words incompetent.
It really seems like(based on the documentation they have produced) Oracle is throwing away the high performance super scalable DNS service Dyn had built(that put them in the top 2 DNS providers in the world the other being UltraDNS) for a very crappy generic DNS service that is available from any number of service providers out there.
Many of the biggest sites on the internet rely on Dyn, Oracle (from their info they provided today) couldn't of done a worse job at customer communication and there will be a mass exodus of customers as a result.
I really liked how Dyn's user interface really hasn't changed much at all in the past decade. It just worked, they didn't mess with it. I really get sick of these newer SaaS services constantly messing with the UI 98% of the time for no good reason. Dyn was an exception to that.
sigh.
Wanted to give an update. They replied to me at 3:30am my time(Pacific time). I imagine they are getting flooded with questions.
Anyway they said
========
OCI DNS is powered by the same anycast name server network as Oracle Dyn Managed DNS.
You can find our SLA page linked here: https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/regions
https://cloud.oracle.com/en_US/iaas/sla
========
However looking at the SLA there is no mention of the text DNS as far as I can tell. Dyn has an insane SLA. So am awaiting to hear if Oracle is maintaining that same SLA or will it be different.
Oracle would struggle I think to come up with worse communications vs what was sent yesterday. It screams they were super rushed to get it out the door which is just stupid to rush this kind of thing.
"I really get sick of these newer SaaS services constantly messing with the UI 98% of the time for no good reason. Dyn was an exception to that."
Indeed. Dyn's death marks the end of one more of the services that were actually run competently and in a way that didn't constantly screw with its users. The internet is poorer for its passing.
Who cares?, Oracle are nothing more than another "greed is good" US Multinational, with zero corporate or social responsibility, that doesn't deserve to exist.
I haven't used Dyndns since they started charging, and Individuals couldn't give a flying ferk about "leveraging the best-in-class DNS, Web Application Security, and Email Delivery services within OCI and extend their applications across a comprehensive platform to build, scale, and operate their cloud infrastructure"
Same.
Only drama is that it gets blocked by Facebook etc, so I couldn't publicise the backup stream for our community station that I was running back then. Ended up using a different streaming platform so the problem went away; but was annoying that it was automatically flagged as evil.
As probably lots of others, and as the article mentions, I've been using free noip.com to access my home machines for years. However, the hostname I use is *.ddns.net. Is that served by Dyn actually, and will I need to pick a new domain? I went to noip.com, but there is nothing on the topic that I could find.
Nicely timed news item. The cheeky Oracle DynDNS are still sending out the autorenewals. It was about to auto-renew my account for two years - but no mention on the site that those two years would end in May.
I also got that email that says it will "remain a business unit within Oracle". No mention anywhere of shutting down the one part of the service I use.
I jumped ship to Zonomi a few months ago when I realised I was paying $60 a year to Oracle for very little with Dyn (although I've otherwise been a happy customer for many years). My home router doesn't know how to talk to Zonomi, but all I've had to do is cron a curl call every day to update Zonomi if my IP changes. And it's free.
Got the email last night - i have (had) a grandfathered in lifetime standard DNS and a dyndns subdomain.
Signed up to a CloudFlaire free account this morning, and moved the standard DNS to that.
PFSense can also update CloudFlair DNS entries very easily.
Took less than an hour to migrate, and havent spent a penny.
All live already! yay to CloudFlaire
I've used dydns a fair amount over the years - both when it was free and a paying customer.
Now I run my own DNS servers for the domains I host on low-cost VPS. Adding a dynamic DNS service was the next logical step and that served quite well for over 3 years. If IRCC the two VPS cost less than the subscriptoin to DynDNS at the time I set them up.
A single VPS and a reverse proxy could be used instead to mitigate the need for a dynamic DNS service.
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