MiniDynDNS
Published
During the last few weeks I've been working on a small, simple and self-contained dynamic DNS server: MiniDynDNS. A friend of mine wanted to bring one of his computers online but didn't want to use an 3rd party service like DynDNS.
Well, you probably know the typical hacking answer: "Why not build something like that ourselves?". How hard can it be? After all we only need a hash table or dictionary for a simple DNS server. Throw in some code to parse and generate DNS packets and your're done.
After a bit of hacking and testing it actually worked. An HTTP interface would be nice so I can tell my router to report changed IPs by itself. So in it went.
You can probably imagine that the result was a funny but scary bit of code. I did some cleanup and ended up with about 600 lines of Ruby. Some more refactoring into several classes resulted into a bit to much glue code for my taste so I reverted back to simple procedural style. The code isn't pretty or fancy but it's easier to understand this way I hope.
So if you want to role your own little DynDNS for your private stuff, take a look. Maybe it's what you want. But remember: It's only build for small stuff, not high-traffic sites. :)