[TriLUG] Hosting web site on old machine at home??

[Rick DeNatale]

On 12/10/05, Chad Thomsen <chad.thomsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> So you have your box running httpd and DNS?  Kewl.  RR really accepts zone
> transfers from its non-business accout home user customers?  I did not think
> they would but have never tried.  I will have to give it a try as it sounds
> cool.

I doubt very much that they will allow you to do a zone transfer.  As
Phillip Rhodes points out, though this isn't necessary.  There are
plenty of dns services out there who support mapping your domain name
to a dynamic isp provided ip address. A few are dyndns.org no-ip.com,
and zoneedit.com which is the one I use. Some of these are free,
sometimes they're free for a subdomain of one of the domains the
service owns, but there's a charge for domains registered to you. 
Keeping such services up to date is normally done by means other than
zone updates via bind etc.  Most use a separate daemon like ddclient
which monitors the current ip address and sends updates via some
protocol (often an http post) when it changes, or when required due to
the services particular policy for informing them you are still alive.

Keep in mind though that although this will let folks find your ip
address from a given name, a reverse lookup of that ip address is
going to resolve to the name your isp assigned to your ip address. I
haven't found this to be a problem, although some software does check
to see that forward and reverse dns lookups match, although this tends
to happen more with servers checking clients than the reverse.  As far
as I know the only way around this problem is to get an pay for some
kind of "business class" service from an isp which allows use of their
DNS servers to set up the reverse zones.


> So the ony cost you have is the cost of your registered domain name
> (unless you count the cost of your hardware/software/broadband).  I suppose
> you would not have to pay for that unless its either taken already or you
> were afraid of somebody else taking it away from you.

This wouldn't work in general.  What you are paying for when you
register is getting your domain into the top-level domain name
servers.  If you want to use say foo.com, the tld servers for the .com
domain have to have entries which point to the name server(s) which
handle foo.com, whether these server(s) are owned by your isp, a
services like zonedit.com, or you. There's no way to get around paying
for that.

If you are willing to use a subdomain of a domain that someone else
owns you can get a "domain" without paying to register, for example
you might use something like myspiffysubdomain.homeip.net and use
dyndns.org which owns the homeip.net domain (and lots of others) and
lets people "register" some number of subdomains with them for no
charge.

--
Rick DeNatale

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