HugoLarge

I use both DynDNS and OpenDNS on my home network since I don’t have a static IP address and sometimes need to access my home network from outside the LAN. I use OpenDNS to provide DNS service for my home network since I’ve found that the OpenDNS DNS servers seem to be more reliable than my ISP DNS. OpenDNS also gives me the ability to manage sites that I may want to block from my children such as porn and phishing sites.

For my home network, I use a Linksys WRT54GL router that runs Tomato open firmware. If you don’t know what Tomato firmware is you can find out more information by following the above link or here is the description taken from the Polarcloud website:

Tomato is a small, lean and simple replacement firmware for Linksys’ WRT54G/GL/GS, Buffalo WHR-G54S/WHR-HP-G54 and other Broadcom-based routers. It features a new easy to use GUI, a new bandwidth usage monitor, more advanced QOS and access restrictions, enables new wireless features such as WDS and wireless client modes, raises the limits on maximum connections for P2P, allows you to run your custom scripts or telnet/ssh in and do all sorts of things like re-program the SES/AOSS button, adds wireless site survey to see your wifi neighbors, and more.

One of the nice features of Tomato firmware is that you can enter up to two Dynamic DNS (DDNS) providers in the GUI interface of your router. Why would you want to do this? Well for me, I use it so I don’t have to have a DDNS client running on one of my computers (all the time) to update my IP address to the DDNS provider if and when it changes.

For me, Tomato firmware works perfectly since I use both DynDNS and OpenDNS and the firmware supports both service right in the GUI. No host based clients needed here. Tomato supports other DDNS services, but these are the two that I use and will reference in this post.

So to setup two DDNS services on your Tomato based router, this is what you do.

First, you need to create accounts for both service at each respective web site. You need to do this because in the router GUI you will need to supply a username and password for each service. You will also need the Hostname that was setup with DynDNS and the Network name (if you have multiple dynamic IP networks setup in your account) for OpenDNS.

Once you get all that setup, logon to your routers web configuration, usually by going to the IP address of the router in your browser of choice. Once logged on, you should see a menu on the left side. There you will want to click on Basic | DDNS which will bring up the DDNS setup GUI.

I’ve already filled my DDNS information into my router and this is what it looks like.

As you can see, I’ve blocked out some of the information such as my IP, username and DynDNS hostname. Also, you can see there are two Dynamic DNS settings that can be set here.

For my first service I’ve used DynDNS and you can see that a username, password and hostname is needed for this configuration. I don’t use wildcards or MX records, but you could if needed.

For the second Dynamic DNS service I’m using the OpenDNS service. Again, you need to provide a username and password for the basic configuration. But since I have more than one dynamic IP Network setup in my account with OpenDNS, I need to provide the Network name of this network as well. If you don’t provide this information, you will get a status of Invalid Hostname in the result block. But if you don’t have more than one network setup in your account, you won’t need to put anything in the Network (optional) Block.

Once you enter all your information here, click the save button and you should be on your way to using Dynamic DNS services with your home router.