DYNAMIC DNS - .co.za

S

stoke

Honorary Master
Joined
Aug 7, 2003
Messages
10,531
Reaction score
6
Location
Afreek du Zuid - KZN - Ramsgate.
I have been researching DDNS now for like 3 years - watching and waiting for a decent local provider that can provide the service.

Now - a new year arrives and I search again and have come up with the following:

http://www.ledge.co.za/software/dddns/ = R128 ex vat per year. Anybody can use it. Software updates the entry.
http://www.sadomain.co.za/services/060-dynamic-dns.htm = First one free - R40 per year for each next - MUST BE USING SADOMAIN's DSL. They update your entry when you log in.
http://www.dynamic-dns.co.za/Services.htm - R160 [ex vat?] per year - Anybody can use it. Software updates the entry.
http://www.webafrica.co.za/kb/dns/dynamic_dns_updates.html - R50 per MONTH - must be a WebAfrica DSL user/Webafrica is hosting your domain.Software updates the entry.


Anybody know of others ????
 
still prefer zoneedit and the like.

What I want is nameserver hosting not dynamic dns. Do you know of any local services that can host a coza domain for nameservers?
 
www.dyndns.org is very good, but not local - wondering why you want a local one specifically?

For free ddns, I also use freedns.afraid.org.
 
stoke said:
ZoneEdit cannot host a .co.za domain. And if they could - capped users will suffer.
Click to expand...

I have a few coza domains on zoneedit.
Wrt capped users...well, you cant have everything. There are so many things to consider when hosting sites and unfortunately, until such time as this country catches up to the rest of the world in terms of bandwidth prices, coza administration practices etc etc, there will always be some users that are not catered for. One of those things.
 
stoke said:
So that I can Dynamic DNS my ADSL connection to my local .co.za domain.
So that I can host games that soft-capped people will be able to play "no problem".
Click to expand...

co.za domains are fine with both providers I mentioned above.
As for capped users, it is also no problem, since the dns server they use provides the lookup - your ability to update, however, would suffer if you are capped.
 
stoke said:
ZoneEdit cannot host a .co.za domain. And if they could - capped users will suffer.
Click to expand...
Ummm no, I am using ZoneEdit.com for a .co.za domain's DNS, and once local ZA DNS caches cache the DNS records for such a domain, it should be ok for locals...

<added>
About capped locals - doesn't make much difference since 2005-11-01 since SAIX forces non-TelkodemonopolyInternet ISPs to hardcap, so even if you hosted your .co.za site locally using ZoneEdit.com for DNS, those capped locals still wouldn't be able to get to your locally hosted .co.za site...nice thing about the ISDSL accounts is that up to 30GB local traffic...​
</added>
 
Thanks for the heads up on ZoneEdit and DynDNS.org. Last time I tried a .co.za they were like - what's that ... but - that was more than a year ago.

Yup - ISDSL is "Soft Cappable" up to 30GB.
HOWEVER - ICASA have said - Local Access must be uncapped - so it'll come back.
 
stoke said:
Yup - ISDSL is "Soft Cappable" up to 30GB.
HOWEVER - ICASA have said - Local Access must be uncapped - so it'll come back.
Click to expand...

The (soft) capping should still not be a problem (unless I misunderstand something).
The way the DNS lookup works is:
1) You tell the world that your domain's ip address can be found on a certain nameserver (in this case, lets say ns1.dydns.org) - This is set when you register with co.za.
2) ns1.dyndns,org knows that yourdomain.co.za is at ip 165.165.x.x, and you update that when need be
3) Someone in SA wants to go to your domain, and their DNS server (dns.is.co.za or dns.saix.net or whatever) needs to resolve the name to an ip
4) now, ns1.dyndns.org has set the TTL (time to live) of your domain to 1 second (or 60 seconds or whatever). This overrides the default setting of 24 hours, so the DNS server (NOT the user) has to do an international lookup against ns1.dyndns.org for your ip. The cache of that server is then updated, and the ip address returned to the user. Note: the user did not "go international", the DNS server did.

The reason ddns works so well, is because of the TTL - if the TTL was not so low, but set to the 24 hour scheme, it would not be so good. Some of the free ddns servers have 3600sec (1 hour) TTL periods - keep this in mind if you test! dyndns is much lower (work on 60, but it may be as low as 1-5 seconds from my experience).
 
Moederloos said:
The (soft) capping should still not be a problem (unless I misunderstand something).
The way the DNS lookup works is:
1) You tell the world that your domain's ip address can be found on a certain nameserver (in this case, lets say ns1.dydns.org) - This is set when you register with co.za.
2) ns1.dyndns,org knows that yourdomain.co.za is at ip 165.165.x.x, and you update that when need be
3) Someone in SA wants to go to your domain, and their DNS server (dns.is.co.za or dns.saix.net or whatever) needs to resolve the name to an ip
4) now, ns1.dyndns.org has set the TTL (time to live) of your domain to 1 second (or 60 seconds or whatever). This overrides the default setting of 24 hours, so the DNS server (NOT the user) has to do an international lookup against ns1.dyndns.org for your ip. The cache of that server is then updated, and the ip address returned to the user. Note: the user did not "go international", the DNS server did.

The reason ddns works so well, is because of the TTL - if the TTL was not so low, but set to the 24 hour scheme, it would not be so good. Some of the free ddns servers have 3600sec (1 hour) TTL periods - keep this in mind if you test! dyndns is much lower (work on 60, but it may be as low as 1-5 seconds from my experience).
Click to expand...

BUT, if your IP changes and you are capped, how do you update the internationally hosted DNS server?
 
nic777 said:
BUT, if your IP changes and you are capped, how do you update the internationally hosted DNS server?
Click to expand...
If you're hard-capped then it doesn't matter, but if you're soft-capped then a local Dynamic DNS solution is better, maybe a low-cost local proxy solution would do the trick when you're soft-capped?

PS: who invented these 'soft' & 'hard' capped terms - they don't fully encapsulate the various cappification states...
 
Last edited:
nic777 said:
BUT, if your IP changes and you are capped, how do you update the internationally hosted DNS server?
Click to expand...

Yeah, i did mention that in an earlier post. However, lets look at the options:
1) Total cap - no difference, as no one can get to your site anyway
2) Soft cap - these soft caps have always had some international - although VERY slow. freedns has a tiny script of a few bytes as an updater, and DDNS has agents you can install - also small, so an update in theory is still possible.

Also, you can manually update the DDNS provider - so if need be, and you really want an out, use a dial up account and set the DDNS ip to your ADSL one - not perfect sure, but with Telkom ADSL, what is?
 
IP help

I'm trying to connect to my brothers windose box thru vnc. He has a Telkom USB modem with a Telkom account. Yes it is sad but it was the easiest to get dsl out of my father. (make everything come off his telkom account) :o Well I cannot even ping him on the 165.146.xxx.xxx that we get when going to a site for IP resolving. Now we have setup a account with no-ip nothing the cannot ping the dns.. Where to from here? I need to detect the IP. Can any of you guys maybe tell me to do this or point me to some place usefull.
 
eenduiker said:
I'm trying to connect to my brothers windose box thru vnc. He has a Telkom USB modem with a Telkom account. Yes it is sad but it was the easiest to get dsl out of my father. (make everything come off his telkom account) :o Well I cannot even ping him on the 165.146.xxx.xxx that we get when going to a site for IP resolving. Now we have setup a account with no-ip nothing the cannot ping the dns.. Where to from here? I need to detect the IP. Can any of you guys maybe tell me to do this or point me to some place usefull.
Click to expand...
If your brother has told you what his current ISP assigned IP address is, and that IP doesn't change before/whilst you ping his machine, then it will be a firewall on either side or something inbetween that is configured to drop the ping packets. Having said that, it is more secure to leave such a setting [usually 'stealth'] enabled, or only temporarily disable that specific firewall setting long enough to help getting your PC connected to your brother's PC.

The DynDNS thing is only an issue if his IP address changes whilst you're still busy testing - I suggest worrying about this later on after resolving the initial problem. Depending on the firewalls at each end, you might be able to configure the firewalls to allow pings from each other's IP addresses - in the case of your brother, use the hostname he has setup with No-IP.com instead of his IP address.

PS: welcome to MYADSL :).
 
Forgive me for bringing up this old thread. However what are the options now for local Dynamic DNS Solutions?
 
why not start a new thread, this one is pretty old. I'd also be interested in finding out...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X