Show HN: zzzz.io, a free DynDNS replacement I created on the weekend

by kopf • 12 years ago

156 69 12 years ago

kopf12• 12 years ago

I don't think it's anything incredibly special (especially with the ugly bootstrap theme), and you guys probably all have your own domain names anyhow, but I'm just posting it on the off-chance that it might be useful to someone here.

Plus, I quite like 'zzzz' in comparison to the domain names offered by other free dyndns alternatives out there.

DoubleMalt• 12 years ago

What's the technology stack? Would there be a way to persuade you to opensource it?

tekknolagi• 12 years ago

^^ Seconded.

Udo• 12 years ago

It's very neat, I like the simplicity of the API. If you promise to keep it up for a while, I'll definitely use it!

kopf12• 12 years ago

I use it myself, so it'll be up for the foreseeable future. Enjoy.

VonGuard• 12 years ago

I am fairly shocked it took this long for someone to make a DynDNS replacement. I haven't been able to effectively use DynDNS since last century.

nemasu• 12 years ago

Is there an API to re-assign an IP address to your account?

kopf12• 12 years ago

Yes, there's a very minimal API - you can find more information at https://zzzz.io/faq/ .

It basically just supports updating the IP address associated with your subdomain. As noted on that page, you can simply GET the URL, and your subdomain will point to the IP you performed the request from, or you can specify an IP address explicitly.

karlshea• 12 years ago

Looks cool. IPv6 support would be neat.

Does this work with the AirPort dynamic global hostname? I put my username and password in, but since my IP didn't change since I signed up I couldn't see if it was working right.

justincormack• 12 years ago

Why do you want ipv6 support? There are already ipv6 mechanisms like mobility aren't there (although not set them up yet).

X-Istence• 12 years ago

Because it would be nice to have a DNS entry that resolves to my dynamic IPv6 address that I am given by my ISP...

zaphoyd• 12 years ago

IPv6 mobile address portability attempts to keep your IPv6 address constant as you move around different wireless access points or LANs within a company or ISP network. It doesn't provide a globally static address or way to provide a static hostname.

Even with a static or mostly static IPv6 address the ability to have a dual stack dynamic hostname where both the v4 (that changes a lot) and the v6 (which might change less) is still useful. It is also obviously useful as you roam between office and home and such and want to keep a hostname constant.

larrybolt4• 12 years ago

Personally I use CloudFlare's API to achieve the same, using a small sh-script that I run in cron:

https://gist.github.com/larrybolt/6295160

shaunpud• 12 years ago

I also did a similar one in Python for duckdns.org: https://gist.github.com/shaunpud/0d72f2d23a4ddd0fbab6

tkfu• 12 years ago

Is there any particular reason you didn't just add your domain to the pool at https://freedns.afraid.org/ ?

Fuxy• 12 years ago

Too easy us programmers like to complicate things in order to make them easy. :P

thiagoc• 12 years ago

I'm using it successfully with a custom domain. It works great.

andmarios• 12 years ago

Although this may not be perceived as constructive criticism but freedns is indeed great. It has many features, thousands domains, support for your own domain, perfect availability and it is free. The person behind it seems more interested to provide a free quality service than promote himself.

For anyone building a dynamic IP service, freedns sets the level they should strive for.

hackety• 12 years ago

Is the source for this available somewhere?

gaz• 12 years ago

+1 i'd like to see the source :)

rgbrgb2• 12 years ago

A bit confused. Is this for tunneling localhost like ngrok (https://ngrok.com/)?

larrybolt4• 12 years ago

No, localtunnel or ngrok will tunnel a local port (such as for instance 127.0.0.1:80) to a public domain name (alias.ngrok.com). This only redirects an alias to your ip address (alias.zzzz.io -> wan-ip-address).

The big difference is when you are inside your local network behind the router, or at work behind a firewall simple accessing the wan-ip won't reach your machine, unless you do port-forwarding (which isn't always straightforward or even possible.)

Ngrok solves this problem by being in the middle, both your machine and a person visiting alias.ngrok.com are connecting to ngrok, ngrok just passes the data along.

What this service however is good for is to have a dns address that always points to your local machine or your home network if your ISP doesn't provide you with a static ip (thus your ip changes every so often).

rgbrgb2• 12 years ago

Ah, OK. Thanks for the explanation. I wish there was some compromise where I could tunnel a local port in such a way that didn't require a server.

nmc2• 12 years ago

DynDNS replacement

I would disagree. This may look like a replacement from the end-user's point of view, but it does not address the real issues of DNS management: space to store all zone data, bandwidth to support requests flow, resources to handle the load.

Either you are just proxying someone else's service, or you are running your own on (supposedly) limited resources. Am I wrong?

Moreover, I heard from DynDNS engineers that the main reason that led them to stop their free hostname offer was: it was abused for spamming too often. How do you intend to cope with that?

kopf12• 12 years ago

it does not address the real issues of DNS management: space to store all zone data, bandwidth to support requests flow, resources to handle the load.

You're absolutely right! However, as you said, it solves the user's problem from their point of view.

The main reason I started this project was that other dyndns alternatives (whether they be proxies or "fully-fledged" operations) have rather ugly domain names, in my opinion. 'zzzz' popped into my head, I saw that 'zzzz.io' was free, and decided to get it. A few weeks later, I finally got around to throwing a webapp together so others could benefit.

Not such a horrible thing to do, or?

And yes, the service is backed up by Amazon's Route 53. I did learn a thing or two about BIND and DNS from the experience though, which is also a plus.

LeonidasXIV• 12 years ago

You could've used FreeDNS (freedns.afraid.org) with your own domain. They do this for years.

nmc2• 12 years ago

I entirely agree, and I am glad you got my point.

Not sure about the beauty of 'zzzz', but it certainly is a good thing to learn by doing. Nice job.

You did not answer my question about spam. Are you taking measures to prevent your domain to being flagged as a spammer?

laumars• 12 years ago

Nice resource. Just last month I set up Bind9 on a spare VM for the same reasons (albeit just for personal use).

Is this project something you'd consider releasing the source code for (obviously I'm happy to write my own code if needs be but there's no point in me reinventing the wheel if you already have this sitting on a public git repo)

s_• 12 years ago

Looks good. I have dd-wrt flashed on my home router. Since you are not in default service provider, I will try your service with wget+cron. Will host my own if your works :) http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/DDNS_-_How_to_setup_Cus...

kopf12• 12 years ago

That should work fine!

Email me if you run into trouble.

mokkol• 12 years ago

Very neat! How much does it cost you to keep this service up? In case I need it and want to donate.

kopf12• 12 years ago

Not a whole lot. The domain itself costs ~50 euro per year. I'm hoping the AWS costs won't run too high - I figure a few euro per month.

It's not really about the money but about the rush of endorphins you get when an email arrives in your inbox to the effect that a total stranger found something you made so useful that they decided to give you a few euro out of the good of their own heart.

tejasm• 12 years ago

I can send across a few amazon credit codes which will help you with aws. How do I get in touch?

larrybolt4• 12 years ago

Btw, if you are trying to give your home-network with a dynamic ip address a hostname to access it from the internet, it may be worth looking up if your ISP provider doesn't provide that already for you out of the box:

dig -x `curl -s http://icanhazip.com`

Here in Belgium Telenet does that, which means for my home network I could just setup a CNAME record to that hostname.

philbarr• 12 years ago

Looks good!

Minor gripe:

"Why did you make zzzz?

DynDNS was a very popular dynamic DNS provider which in the 90s [did something?]."

kopf12• 12 years ago

Whoops! Fixed. Thanks!

dshankar• 12 years ago

Cool hack! How did you implement this? Care to share the details? You mention Route 53, but I'm curious to learn more. What does the stack look like? How do your update zonefiles, assign subdomains etc.?

It would be fun to hack on this + a cryptocurrency component - let's say, zzzzcoin - people can pay an incredibly small sum of zzzzcoin per request. This could be used to deter spam, remain free/affordable, reward early adopters, and turn into meaningful revenue.

clyfe• 12 years ago

We also built https://entrydns.net/ It's a more complete solution. Running for about 3 years now.

shock• 12 years ago

Looks good, thanks for making it free!

stevekemp2• 12 years ago

Looks good.

I've been pondering git-dns.io for a while - storing DNS in git and using hooks to trigger rebuilds. Unfortunately most of the DNS resellers are expensive, and using Amazon means your hosted domains get given "random nameservers", which complicates the setup for somebody importing lots of domains.

I'd love to be able to say "Use a/b/c.git-dns.io" for the nameservers, but all the resellers of DNS make you pay a lot of cash up-front for vanity nameservers, which I think would make the thing unprofitable.

(Running bind/tinydns on three toy virtual machines around the world would work - but DNS-servers are traditionally a DoS magnet, so I know I'd get taken down sooner or later if I went down that path.)

zrail• 12 years ago

Have you seen LuaDNS? It sounds sort of what you're talking about, and they let you set up vanity servers if you want.

http://www.luadns.com/

stevekemp2• 12 years ago

Yes I looked at several companies looking to see who I could use as a back-end, LuaDNS jumped out because I've an interest in Lua, but it seemed more like they'd be a competitor than a back-end provider.

That said I think I pretty much shelved the idea when I considered how hard it would be to get paying customers.

nly• 12 years ago

A lot of well established DNS providers already support dynamic DNS. Hurricane Electric even integrate dynamic update with their IPv6 tunnel service (so updating your IPv6 tunnel automatically updates your dyndns).

cowchase• 12 years ago

For anyone looking into free DynDNS alternatives: I have tested several of the established alternatives without success. I then looked into some of the newcomers and ended up choosing http://duckdns.org. The setup was super easy and the service has been absolutely reliable so far.

NicoJuicy• 12 years ago

Perhaps an alternative is pagekite ( https://pagekite.net/ ) an opensource (Python) tunneling service. It's also more avanced then this one.

And yes, it can modify your localhost:9999 to mydomain:80. Why is that usefull? My ISP blocks ports upto 8999, so i wouldn't run a webserver / ftp / smtp / ... without paying extra for unlocking those ports :)

kopf12• 12 years ago

I'm afraid pagekite addresses a different problem to zzzz.

oebs• 12 years ago

Why 8.8.8.8, which is a name server operated by Google, as an authoritative NS record for zzzz.io, in addition to the Route53 entries?

jakio• 12 years ago

It seems we've had a similar weekend! https://alias.re

ChrisArchitect• 12 years ago

this related to or based on http://www.hopper.pw ?

kopf12• 12 years ago

Nope

digitalsushi• 12 years ago

Will you ban a client if it posts updates on a regular cycle? I got banned from dyndns because I wrote my own client and put it into cron. (I think it's actually smart they banned me, since it was a huge waste of time to update with no new info)

kopf12• 12 years ago

I'll be keeping an eye on logs and AWS expenditure to see if this becomes a problem. :)

I'm not one to jump to the nuclear option of banning clients outright - if I notice behaviour that's harmful and needs to be corrected, I'll email the individuals concerned and talk them through how to use the service more efficiently, while also improving my own documentation on the website (which I admit isn't as thorough as I'd like).

ja30278• 12 years ago

I hacked up something similar on appengine a few years ago, though it's more of a url shortener than a DynDNS replacment.

http://symlinkd.com

smaudet• 12 years ago

Signup broken in Chrome (lol), works just fine in Firefox :)

ken_laun• 12 years ago

Looks neat, good! And I like the phrase "Get Yours Now" on the top page. Thanks for making it free.

pbreit2• 12 years ago

"created on the weekend" is not very reassuring. Why would you tout that (if you wanted users vs showing off)?

kopf12• 12 years ago

I don't want to sound off-hand, but - what are you worried about?

The application is basically a thin layer in front of AWS's Route 53. All user data is stored safely and securely.

Are you just as suspicious of popular applications that sprang up from hackdays?

pbreit2• 12 years ago

I use to use DynDNS to access my POS terminal at my retail store. Dynamic dns is frequently an important tool so, yes, I would be very wary of using a hackaday production of it.

vohof• 12 years ago

Seems the same with http://xip.io

Show HN: zzzz.io, a free DynDNS replacement I created on the weekend

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