As mentioned in Ubuntu in the Basement, I’ve embarked on a fool’s errand of a project. Already, I’m struggling. I signed up with Dynamic Network Services (aka DynDNS) to use their Dyanamic DNS service. I looked around and there are several outfits offering this service, but DynDNS was named in the Ubuntu documentation and, as it happens, the Dynamic DNS feature in my Netgear WGR614 (v7) WAP / router only supports DynDNS. I got it running last week and after configuring port forwarding I was able to http into the router from the public side as well as SSH into my Linux box via the the DynDNS host I established. Easy peasy.
Yesterday, I tried it from another location (outside my home). Didn’t work anymore. So when I got home, I tried again. Still broken. I logged into my router from the private side, told it to respond to pings on the public side, then pinged it. That worked. Then I tried to SSH into my Linux box via the DynDNS host. It worked. Aargh! I turned ping off again on my router, then tried to login once more via the DynDNS host. Hallelujah! It was still working.
But I wasn’t convinced. I got Paul on Skype and asked him to http into the DynDNS host. No good. Then I turned ping back on again and asked him to ping the public address. That worked. When he tried to http in after turning ping back on, it still didn’t work.
I turned ping off and then tracked down a Shiner Bock (a habit I picked up while living in Texas, but that’s another story) from my fridge. Saddened, I sucked down my suds and pondered next steps. I want to believe that it’s something DynDNS is doing wrong, but I really doubt it. It’s probably my router acting flaky or perhaps Comcast is up to something. Who knows, but I gotta figure it out or else things get messier since I’ll have to put my Linux box on the other side of my NAT and then set-up a firewall of some sort (which I KNOW I will not have much fun doing).
