Best Dynamic DNS for OS X

There is also OpenDNS you can look into. However, if you observe over several days what you DNS from your provider is, you may find that it never changes. Mine seems to remain static although I only have a dynamic one. Even if I renew my lease it always returns with the same DNS.

OS X Server needs and wants static IP on your NAT'd network.

For the AirPort, you might try this.

For these configuration cases, I usually end up with the Apple Wi-Fi configured as an access point (what Apple calls bridged mode) and using a gateway firewall box with Dynamic DNS support, and preferably one with an embedded VPN server in the gateway box. That isolates all of the Apple gear from the DDNS traffic and isolates the VPN from the NAT, though that can be an advantage.

FWIW, the ZyXEL ZYWALL USG series does work for these configurations and does have DDNS support, though I've not tested that DDNS support quite yet — but that testing will happen over the next month or two, for a deployment that's rolling out.

There are two ways to handle this, the most common approach is to have your router or firewall run a DDNS client and update your DDNS service, sadly Apple AirPort Extreme is not really suited to this. You would have to check your router/firewall to see what options it has. The other approach is to run a software DDNS client application on your Mac to do the same thing.

DynDNS is one of the oldest providers of such a service and does provide a Mac client, no-ip.com also do but I don't find it as good, there is also dtdns.com which is a bit more interesting as their Mac client is in the form of a command-line script which would make it easier to automate and run on a Mac server even with no users logged in on the server itself.

The Mac server can run one of these clients even if it itself only has an internal private static IP address. I do this myself to access my home Mac. You would have your home router then do port forwarding to the internal private NATed IP address of your Mac server. As a result I can if I wish use my home Mac as a web server via a standard DNS name even though my home Internet IP address is dynamic.

For my place of work I have proper official static public IP addresses as I run multiple servers.

eulolixa wrote:

thanks all for the reply. any one of you ever used the dynamic dns with domain.google.com?

John what's the client that you use for dtdns.com??

thanks

I used one of the Linux solutions based on a shell script, see below. You can automate it running in the background either via cron or a launchd script.

#!/bin/bash

#IPADDR=`ifconfig -a | grep -A1 en0 | grep inet | awk '{ print $2 }'`
IPADDR=`curl -s ifconfig.me/ip`
LASTIP=`nslookup nyhostname.dtdns.net ns1.darktech.org | grep -A1 myhostname |
grep Address | awk '{
print $2 }'`

echo -n "`date` - "

if [ "$IPADDR" != "$LASTIP" ]; then
  echo -e "GET /api/autodns.cfm?id=myusername&pw=mypassword&client=BSD
HTTP/1.1\nHost: www.dtdns.com\nUser-Agent: bash\n\n" | \
            nc www.dtdns.com 80 > /dev/null 2>&1
  echo "Posted IP change from $LASTIP to $IPADDR"
else
  echo "IP still $IPADDR"
fi
exit 0