APM: Q from APM last night..."How to run a personal site w/o hosting?"

[jameschoate at austin.rr.com]

This came up at last nights meeting of the Austin Perl
Mongers...how to run a site (eg something.com or
something_else.org) without using a hosting service or
paying commercial fees.

Note that you need to check your AUP (Acceptable Use
Policy) provided by the basic connectivity provider.
There may be bandwidth limits or port blocking that
means you need to use a different port, etc.

The basic setup is you've got a computer running Linux,
BSD, Winblows, Mac OS X, Plan 9, QNX, Amoeba, etc. You
want to run a webserver, RDBMS, BBS, etc. In the
particular context it was meant as a demonstration of
skillset for job interviews.

The short answer to this question is 'dynamic dns'. But
that didn't satisfy a couple of people alas.

So...

Let's first understand what Dynamic DNS is about...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS

Seems pretty simple. So the first step is to register
a domain with your favorite name registrar.  This
usually runs from a couple of bucks to $35 if you go
with the big boys.

Then you find yourself a dynamic DNS provider. I use
DynDNS because they've been around since the Cretaceous
with regard to dynamic DNS.

http://www.dyndns.com/

They charge something like $25/yr to have them host
your domain. Once you've got an account with DynDNS
you're back to your registrar where you tell them the
IP address (use at least two) of your name resolver.

Now when people try to access your domain the request
goes to the DNS registry and gets redirected to DynDNS
servers. How does it get from here to your actual box?

Well there is this nify Perl script called ddclient that
is free. And since it's Perl is reasonably easy to hack
even for weird operating systems. It grabs the current
IP (whether static or dynamic/DHCP) and sends it back
to the DynDNS servers. So when they get a request for
your domain they now have an IP to send the packets to.

http://ddclient.wiki.sourceforge.net/

http://freshmeat.net/projects/ddclient/

At this point you need to make sure your box has the
latest security patches, have whatever services you
want exposed turned on, and away you go.

--
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Venimus, Vidimus, Dolavimus

James Choate
jameschoate at austin.rr.com
james.choate at twcable.com
512-657-1279
www.ssz.com
http://www.twine.com/twine/1128gqhxn-dwr/solar-soyuz-zaibatsu
http://www.twine.com/twine/1178v3j0v-76w/confusion-research-center

Adapt, Adopt, Improvise
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