Subject: Re: Domain name?
From: Nathan A. McQuillen (nm@steaky.dhs.org)
Date: Tue Dec 18 2001 - 10:09:22 MST
A few clarifications:
I've been using DHS for two years. Their service has been absolutely
rock-solid, and if one (as another post suggested) is worried about their
persistence as a free service, send 'em a little donation every month.
> However, to use a *.dhs.org address rather than *.*.*.roadrunner.com or
> whatever address, you must contact your ISP and tell them that you're going
> to run your own name server, or you'll have to ask them to add your
> *.dhs.org address as an alias on their nameserver. But because you have a
> dynamic IP address, they probably won't like this because it is possible
> that some other person would be dynamically assigned that address and then
> they would get all the traffic and there would be no server to accept it.
> They also are probably against this type of behavior because it could
> potentially cut into their own web serving business.
I never contacted my ISP about running a server. I don't see why you'd
have to, and most cabl modem providers would, I fear, respond to such a
notice by capping or suspending one's service. The server policy, where
not expressly banned or filtered, is usually "don't ask, don't tell."
> Running a nameserver alerts all the nameserves on the internet to resolve
> your IP address to your given domain/host name. You can't just add it in
> the /etc/hosts directory. You've got to do a lot more than that,
> unfortunately.
Except you /can/ do this if you want just to make your machine web-visible
and mail accessible through that DHS name. I've been doing it, as I said,
for two years. I was surprised when it "just worked," but it did. DHS acts
as that nameserver, propagates the IP/name mapping, and the turnover is 24
hours, maximum, if you need to change the configuration.
DHS has a dynamic host option, which should work with your DHCP setup; you
can also, as I did before @Home exploded, grab that IP address and enter
it manually.
You can also pretty easily register a domain name and point it toward your
machine, but that gets a /little/ hairier to update, depending on your
service. I've gotten good value from jumpdomain for that.
- n2
This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Tue Dec 18 2001 - 09:11:32 MST