As a cloud server customer you get access to rackspace's free DNS service.

When I fist saw this product I had an instance light-bulb moment, I could stop paying for a dynamic DNS service and build my own private one. As a broadband (DHCP) user I have a very basic requirement of needing to regularly update an A record so that I can find my pc :)

To bring my idea into fruition I began researching; I need a cli tool which I could run from cron on my linux box (to send the DNS update requests to rackspace). In my research I found rscurl, a cli tool to control cloud servers, as rackspace have a standard API for all their products I have been able to use rscurl to develop rsdns.

rsdns is a series of cli tools to adding/deleting/changing rackspace DNS records, as part of the tool development I have created a script called rsdns-dc.sh to run on my machine, below is a short how to:

How to get free dynamic dns from rackspace.

Pre-requisit: This is for linux/mac, if you want to do this on windows you'll need bash, curl, awk, sed & dig installed - google is your friend.

The instructions below assume that you (a) have a domain and (b) have already changed your NS records to point to dns1.stabletransit.com & dns2.stabletransit.com.

Download the latest rsdns from gitgub and unpack somewhere, I like ~/bin/rsdns.

Go to your rackspace management portal and grap your username & API key (It's under "Your Account" -> "API Access")

Create a config file for rsdns (~/.rsdns_config) with your settings.

#!/bin/bash
RSUSER=linickx  
RSAPIKEY=123456  
RSPATH=~/bin/rsdns/

You need your domain created on rackspace, you can either use rackspaces GUI to do this (It's under "Hosting" -> "Cloud Servers" -> "serverabc" -> "DNS" ) or you can use rsdns, like so.

#!/bin/bash
[LINICKX@SERVER rsdns]$./rsdns-domain.sh -d www.linickx.com -e [email protected]

Once you have a domain setup you need an A record, this step was a deliberate design to avoid any rouge cron jobs from creating a million records, the dynamic client will only update an existing record - not create a new one.

To create the a record you going to need an IP address, it can be something random like the below, or you can use http://icanhazip.com to get your actual current IP. Again to create a record, you can use the rackspace GUI (It's under "Hosting" -> "Cloud Servers" -> "serverabc" -> "DNS" -> "yourdomain" > "Add") or you can use rsdns....

#!/bin/bash
[LINICKX@SERVER rsdns]$./rsdns-a.sh -n dynamichost.linickx.com -i 123.123.123.123 -t 3600

In the above the TTL is set to 1hr, this is so that DNS caches do not keep the record too long. That's all the pre-work done, now lets get your dynamic host setup!

The script to update your a record is rsdns-dc.sh, and you run it like this...

#!/bin/bash
[LINICKX@SERVER rsdns]$./rsdns-dc.sh -n dynamichost.linickx.com

Easy huh? The script uses icanhazip to get your current IP, it then update the A record with it.

I never switch off my router so I have create a created a cronjob to run that script every 2 hours, plus the 1hr TTL should mean that the record is roughly in sync with my IP without making unnecessary requests - You can run the script more often if you like, just stay under the limits --> according to the API guidelines you can make upto 25 changes per min / 2 per second.

I use redhat based linux systems, so I can simply drop the following file called rsdns-dc into /etc/cron.d/ with this...

* */2  * * *     linickx /home/linickx/bin/rsdns/rsdns-dc.sh -n dynamichost.linickx.com &>/dev/null

Now we are actually done! Free private Dynamic DNS on your own zone, what more could you want?