1. Did wife trick you into a trip to the mall? Did you forget to DVR the football game? Login via your smart phone and record it!

2. Has your kid been begging you for the hottest toy of the season? Don’t get trampled at your local store the day before Christmas trying to get your shopping done (you waited that long, really?), order it easily online knowing that the website is hosted with reliable DNS! (well hopefully it is…) Now all you have to do is hope that UPS or FedEx is just as reliable ; )

3. Going out of town? Make sure your house (and all of your presents!) are safe while you are away by setting up a security camera and viewing it remotely!

4. Supposed to be back at work on Tuesday, but end up snowed in while visiting family across the country? Easily access all of your files and work from wherever you happen to be stuck! (Just as long as you have an internet connection)

What other cool ways can DNS help you survive the holiday season? Leave your comments below!

As the holiday season fast approaches, you should really be thinking about your web traffic. With more and more people skipping the mall experience for online shopping, you need to make sure your site is running in tip top shape! Your bottom line will thank you later.

1. Do you manage your DNS internally? Do you have a backup hosting provider? If your primary host goes down, a second hosting provider can still divert your traffic to the right place. (Just make sure your offline settings are directed to a different IP address)

2. Monitor it! If your site goes out at 2 am, will you know immediately, or will you have to wait until 9 am when a customer finally calls in to ask whats up with your site? 5 minutes of downtime isn’t good, let alone hours! With server monitoring, you will get notifications the second something goes wrong with your site.

3. Failover support? What if your site does go down? So you are notified, but what will you do? If you have failover support, your traffic can be diverted to another IP address, web site or to a custom web page stored on our servers. When your server comes back up online, we will undo the failover settings and normal operations will continue. Your site and customers won’t miss a beat.

Any other tips for keeping your holiday traffic in check? Leave them below! Also, if you like this article, be sure to share it on Facebook and Twitter!

We just recently set up a Reef Tank in the office and wanted a cool way to check on it while we were away (we are total dorks, we know.) So, we decided to set up a webcam.  It was cheap and easy and with No-IP, you can check in online, even if you have one of those pesky dynamic IPs. Don’t have a fish tank to watch? The options are limitless! Monitor your front door, security for your office, your refrigerator, or anything!  Just make sure that you aren’t invading anyone’s privacy or breaking any of these laws.

1. Buy a webcam. You can find a cheap one online, we ordered ours from Amazon.

2. Place your camera where you would like it.  Our reef tank cam is attached with electrical tape to the side of the tank.  We also have other office cams that are mounted to the ceiling.

3. Have a dynamic IP? In order to see your webcam easily over the internet, you will need to create an account with us. You can check out this video if you need help getting started with us.

1. Create an account from the homepage.
2. After you fill out your credentials and receive your account verification email, log in to your new No-IP account.
3. Create a username
4. Click the hosts/redirects tab
5. Create a new host- leave all of the information that is already clicked the same.
6. Behind a router or firewall? You will have to forward your ports.  Take note: our documentation on port forwarding is limited due to the vast amounts of routers.  Please check out your routers support page for more information if you are lost.
7. Download and install our dynamic update client. Our DUC will automatically keep track of your dynamic IP changes.
8. Now, you just need to check to see if everything is working correctly.  You can go to canyouseeme.org to confirm that your ports are forwarded correctly and that you can view your reef camera from the web.

4. Once you have completed the above steps, it is time to log in to your camera via the host you created to see what your fish are up to! You just need to make sure the webcam’s software is launched and ready to accept internet connections.

5. Viola! A quick and easy way to set up a webcam on a dynamic IP address. Enjoy!

Questions or comments? Leave them below!

No-IP Squared (Backup DNS) offers a great way to beef up your DNS infrastructure. As of this writing, we have points of presence in over 100 locations across the globe.

If you maintain your own DNS server it’s pretty easy to setup. Follow these simple steps:

Follow these simple steps:

1. Edit your DNS server to allow zone transfers to our distribution server. You want to make sure that when you make updates to your zone file that our system knows about it.
Slave name servers check for zone transfers based on the REFRESH SOA (Start of Authority) value for your zone. A secure name server will disallow zone transfers to the public. You’ll need to allow zone transfers to our system 8.23.224.170.

This is what it will look like in BIND:

zone "dansfishtanks.com" {
....
allow-transfer { 8.23.224.170; };
}

Since the address 8.23.224.170 is not on a public facing name server, you should also enable notifies. Notify short circuits waiting for the refresh timer to expire and tells all of the slaves to go grab
a new copy of the zone right away.  But since our distribution server is not listed in the zone file, you’ll need to use also-notify

Your BIND configuration will now look like this:

zone "dansfishtanks.com" {
....
allow-transfer { 8.23.224.170; };
notify yes;
also-notify { 8.23.224.170; };
}

2. Configure your master IP in the No-IP Interface: Go to Manage Domains. Select your domain, then click edit. Here, you will enter the IP address of your master server.

3. Behind a Firewall? Make sure you don’t have any firewall rules that would prevent our servers from talking to yours. You’ll need port 53 UDP and TCP open for 8.23.224.170

4. Verify the zone transfers work properly. You can make a test change to your zone file by just incrementing the zones serial number and applying the update. Then, verify that we have the new ip address.

Using Dig you should see the following:

dig @yournamserver.com mydomain.com SOA +short
Apply serial number update

dig @yournameserver.com mydoimain.com SOA +short
Should see new serial number

Then check us
dig @8.23.224.170 mydomain.com SOA +short
This should match the new serial number, if it doesn’t match then something is not quite right. Try reviewing the steps above for an error, or if you still cant quite get it, give our support team a buzz, that’s what they’re here for.

5. Update your zone file to include our name server (NS) records. So, if you’ve made a successful update to our system, now its time to add our
NS records to your zone.

Your BIND zone file might look like this:

$TTL 2d ; default TTL is 2 days
$ORIGIN example.com.
@ IN SOA ns1.dansfishtanks.com. hostmaster.dansfishtanks.com. (
2003080800 ; serial number
2h ; refresh = 2 hours
15M ; update retry = 15 minutes
3W12h ; expiry = 3 weeks + 12 hours
2h20M ; minimum = 2 hours + 20 minutes
)
; main domain name servers
IN NS ns1.dansfishtanks.com.
IN NS ns2.dansfishtanks.com.
; mail domain mail servers
IN MX mail.danfishtanks.com.com.
; A records for name servers above
ns1 IN A 1.2.3.4
ns2 IN A 1.2.3.5
; A record for mail server above
mail IN A 192.168.0.5

Now add our name servers records:
IN NS ns1.no-ip.com.
IN NS ns2.no-ip.com.
IN NS ns3.no-ip.com.
IN NS ns4.no-ip.com.
IN NS ns5.no-ip.com.

Your zone file will look like this: (don’t forget to update the serial number!)

$TTL 2d ; default TTL is 2 days
$ORIGIN example.com.
@ IN SOA ns1.dansfishtanks.com. hostmaster.dansfishtanks.com. (
2003080801 ; serial number
2h ; refresh = 2 hours
15M ; update retry = 15 minutes
3W12h ; expiry = 3 weeks + 12 hours
2h20M ; minimum = 2 hours + 20 minutes
)
; main domain name servers
IN NS ns1.dansfishtanks.com.
IN NS ns2.dansfishtanks.com.
IN NS ns1.no-ip.com.
IN NS ns2.no-ip.com.
IN NS ns3.no-ip.com.
IN NS ns4.no-ip.com.
IN NS ns5.no-ip.com.

; mail domain mail servers
IN MX mail.danfishtanks.com.
; A records for name servers above
ns1 IN A 1.2.3.4
ns2 IN A 1.2.3.5
; A record for mail server above
mail IN A 192.168.0.5

4. Don’t forget the glue! Last step is to tell the root servers where to look. This is done at your registrar. If your domain registration is with No-IP, (Your domain isn’t registered with us?! Transfer it today!)

5. Enjoy Peace of Mind! You’ve just increased your DNS presence 10 fold. Just make sure you keep your email address current with No-IP so that you can get important
maintenance notifications of changes on our end that may require action on your part (in the rare event of IP address changes)

This example uses BIND. Very similar actions are needed for other servers such as NSD or Microsoft DNS server.

Any questions? Please do not hesitate to ask for help. Give us a call or open a Support Ticket.

Let’s face it, we have all (or at least I have) jumped onto an unprotected WI-Fi network. When I was in college, I even considered knocking on my neighbors door (whose network was secure) to ask if they wanted to share a network and split the cost, but what would the dangers of that had been? And what are the dangers of not having your own network secure? Well, for starters, my neighbors could have been wrongfully accused of things if I were looking at or doing illegal things online, (I wasn’t and don’t), but if I had, the feds could have knocked on their door one day, like when this guy got busted for downloading images he hadn’t downloaded.

Also, unprotected wireless networks, also set you up for vulnerabilities on your computers.  Your files could be stolen, or your private info (such as bank information, passwords, etc.) could be stolen as well.

The only way to protect yourself from this happening, is to secure your wireless network. Follow these steps and you should be all set.

1. Open your router settings. This is typically done by typing “192.168.1.1” into your browser.
Once the page loads, you will need to login to the admin settings, the generic login/password is different depending on the router brand that you are using, so check out the directions manual that came with the router to determine yours. The most common defaults are admin / password.

2. Change your router password. This is the password that we just talked about. (10 Tips for Choosing a Safe Password) If you forget to change this, your network is still accessible.  Anyone can login to your router and change your settings. This is a step that many forget to do, but it is definitely one of the most important.

3. Next, change the name of your wireless network. Do not name the network after the router aka Belkin. Also, do not use your own name, home address or other personal information when naming your network. You can name your network something funny or just something easy to remember, either way, it’s not that important, but it just let’s you and others know what network they are connecting to.

4. Encrypt Your Wireless Signal: Network encryption is important. It prevents other computers in your area from using your wireless signal. The newest form of encryption is called WPA2, use this if you have the option, otherwise WPA will suffice.  (WEP is the older, less secure version: i.e very easy to hack, stay away from WEP if at all possible) Choose a password that is up to 14 characters long, a combination of letters and numbers.

5. Make sure your router’s firmware is up-to-date. Possible security flaws will be easily avoided if your routers firmware is current.

Any other recommendations for securing a wireless network? Leave them below in the comments! And as always, be sure to share this article with all of your friends on Facebook and Twitter!

Head over to our Facebook page for a chance to win a No-IP T-shirt or a free domain registration and a year of No-IP Plus DNS, during our giveaway!