Updating Your Host's IP Remotely

Introduction to the Domain-DNS.com Remote IP Update Utility

We have added an additional interface to the domain-dns.com system to allow you to dynamically update the IP address for a host without directly using your userid and password. This service is provided for computers that are connected to the internet, but do not have a fixed IP address.

The interface

The interface that we have provided for you to change your IP address is a very simple CGI script on the server side: http://domain-dns.com/ip.cgi When you connect to this script you will pass it the following parameters:

host: The hostname that you want to update
key: The authorization key for that hostname
ip: The new IP address for the hostname (optional)

If the IP address is not supplied, we will use the IP address that the request comes from.

Example:
If you are running unix, you probably have the lynx text based web browser installed. You can use lynx to perform the update like this:

lynx -dump 'http://domain-dns.com/ip.cgi?host=host.example_zone&key=2e790538ad7ef69f142596a1cb60ef34&ip=192.168.99.6'

This interface is provided as is. We do not include any scripts to help you automate your ip address updates. However, it is easy to write a script to do this work. Here is another example in PHP:

<?php
   $host = 'host.example_zone';
   $key = '2e790538ad7ef69f142596a1cb60ef34';
   $ip = '192.168.99.6';
   $output = file("http://domain-dns.com/ip.cgi?host=$host&key=$key&ip=$ip");
?>

You can also use your web browser to do the work by saving a copy of the following HTML form on disk. When you need to perform an update, or you want to see whether the updates are succeeding, load the form into your browser, fill in the values, and click 'Update IP':

<html><body>

<h1>Domain-DNS.com Remote IP Update Form</h1>

<form method="post" action="http://domain-dns.com/ip.cgi">
Hostname: <input name="host"><br>
Key: <input name="key"><br>
IP: <input name="ip"><br>
<input type="submit" value="Update IP">
</form>

</body></html>

Alternatively, you can just go directly to http://domain-dns.com/ip.cgi and it will present the form for you.

Note: This interface is meant to be used when your IP changes. That might mean several times a day. If you access the interface too frequently, you will find that it will refuse to perform updates for you. This restriction is in place to prevent abuse of the service

Security

There is always a possibility that somebody might find out what the Remote IP Key is for one of your hosts. It is probably a good idea for you to change the key every so often because of this possibility. There are 2 ways of doing this:

You can change the Remote IP Key for a specific host by using the Edit Host interface accessed from the Host List page.
You can change ALL Remote IP Keys in your profile by changing your domain-dns.com password.

Important: The corollary to #2 is that when you change your domain-dns.com password, you must update all the scripts on all the hosts that connect to domain-dns.com to change their IP address.

• Domain-dns.com • Baremetal.com • Domain-DNS Documentation •