Switched to DNSEXIT

admin Friday October 4, 2019
 Update
In December 2024, I abandoned DNSEXIT for Cloudflare. This followed years of instability. DNSEXIT uses 4 name servers (ns1, ns2, ns3 and ns4.dnsExit.com), and at least 5 times, one of them stopped working, making resolution flaky. Even though my friend would report issues, DNSEXIT would let the issues persist for days or weeks. DNSEXIT visibly wasn't motivated in keeping users like ourselves. It feels a bit sad to think that we were never satisfied and DNSEXIT never got any financial help, but it seems facilitating hosting a server at home is not a mature business model :-/ Cloudflare's dynamic DNS is not standards-based, but a few client utilities such as cloudflare-ddns support it not too bad.

My good old and short dynamic domain name ido.ath.cx which I used to point to my home PC stopped working after DynDNS stopped being free. Instead of looking for another free provider which could also stop being free at some point, I decided to use a subdomain of my domain philippecloutier.com, which I bought from GoDaddy. Unfortunately, GoDaddy does not offer dynamic DNS, so on my friend Xavier's suggestion, I signed up for free to DNSEXIT and changed my nameservers for DNSEXIT's.

I then simply needed to setup my router to update the IP. OpenWrt allows that using ddns-scripts. DNSEXIT's website is a little amateur, but configuration was not difficult. I was surprised to notice at the end that DNSEXIT asked for a link to its website since I use free DNS. I do not wish to make an electronic payment just for dynamic DNS, but I am not entirely comfortable using such a service for nothing, so... here is your link: Image

The other surprise was to notice that OpenWrt's DNS update method for DNSEXIT appears to send the password unencrypted. Meh. Not a panacea, but good enough for me.


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