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I bought my personal domain name at go-daddy. I already have my home network set up with DynDns and port forwarding so that I can host my personal website on home PC from my DynDns FQDN (eg. MYNAME.Dynalias.com)

How do I take it the last step and forward all traffic from www.PERSONALSITE.com to MYNAME.Dynalias.com

Thanks, Peter

Xerxes
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Peter Walke
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4 Answers4

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I really like ZoneEdit for my DNS record management. It was really easy to setup, and I was able to write a tiny script that runs and refreshes every day in case my IP Address changes.

EDIT: One caveat is that you can only manage the first five DNS records free, but it should be good enough to get you going.

Community
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Bob King
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    +1 .. Apparently ZoneEdit does Dynamic DNS *and* will host the DNS for free. – tomjedrz May 08 '09 at 18:35
  • I used ZoneEdit to point my domain to my home for years before I got some off-site hosting. They are integrated by default into m0n0wall, or they've got clients you can download to keep your IP updated. – Steve Armstrong May 08 '09 at 20:29
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I'm not familiar with the particulars of the GoDaddy DNS administration interface, but what you're looking for is a CNAME entry (AKA an alias.) You want the name www.PERSONALSITE.com to point to MYNAME.Dynalias.com.

Also make sure that you've added the www.PERSONALSITE.com name in your webserver's configuration. How you do that depends on the web server you're using, but some way or the other you need to instruct it to feel responsible for that name.

Mihai Limbăşan
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    Bear in mind this will only work for www.personalsite.com or other subdomains, you cannot make a CNAME for the root record of a domain, so if you just want personalsite.com to forward there you will need another method. – Sam Cogan May 08 '09 at 15:49
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    I added a cname with GoDaddy. I used the default dns providers and under TotalDNS, enabled a cname for www to point to MYNAME.dynalias.com – Peter Walke May 08 '09 at 16:15
  • @SamCogan Good Point. Does anyone know of anyway to point PERSONALSITE.com to MYNAME.dynalias.com? Is there such thing as a wildcard? – Peter Walke May 08 '09 at 16:17
  • There is a wildcard (*), but it again doesn't work for the root. The usual way to get round this is to create an A record with the IP of the server to re-direct to. Obviously this is a solution here, as you would need to update this manually if the IP of your server changes. – Sam Cogan May 08 '09 at 16:22
  • If his router/firewall supports dynamic dns updates then adding an a record with the ip of the server, and configuring ddns in the router/firewall, will work fine. – Jimmie R. Houts May 08 '09 at 16:56
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A better long term solution is to have the dynamic DNS service actually host the DNS for your domain. This will result in better performance for the users who access your site and a greatly reduced likelihood of caching problems, where a user gets a bad IP through DNS because of wrong entries still in the caches.

Setting up DNS hosting on the the DynDNS provider and telling GoDaddy that the DynDNS servers are the DNS for this domain will accomplish this.

Alternatively, the Dynamic DNS provider you reference is an ICANN registrar, so transferring the domain to them will accomplish this. I can't speak to whether they are better or worse than GoDaddy, which has devotees and people who despise them.

EDIT in response to Peter's comment/question: The DNS services are not free, but they do package deal with domain registration.

tomjedrz
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You can forward your domain to another URL from within your GoDaddy account manager. You have the option to select either a 301 (Moved Permanently) or 302 (Temporarily Redirected) response.

Chose the 301 if you plan on keeping that domain forwarded to your DynDNS address and the 302 if you think you'll be changing it sometime in the near future.

berberich
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    This only works for http traffic on port 80. I'd like all traffic to be forwarded... e.g. RDP and FTP traffic. I looked into the cname stuff on go-daddy, but I couldn't get it to work. – Peter Walke May 08 '09 at 15:52