Got Game? How to Host Your Own Game Server with No-IP

  • May 19, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·

For anyone who plays video games, you are aware of the advantages of running your own game server, (not to mention how cool it will make you among your friends) but you may not know how easy it actually is.  Hosting your own video game server isn’t as daunting of a task as it may sound.  Follow these simple instructions and get started today!

1. If you haven’t already, create and activate a No-IP account.
2. Add a Host to your account

Now you’re ready to fill in the details of your new hostname. Here are the steps to deal with the items on this screen:

3. Fill in the Hostname: box with a name of your choosing. It can be anything you like. If you choose a name that’s already in use, an error will be generated and you can then try a different hostname. Since hostnames are unique per domain, you can try using the same hostname and just select a different domain from the dropdown box below to see if that combination is available.

4. Select an available domain from the dropdown box. Note that certain domains are reserved for No-IP Enhanced customers only.

5. Choose the the Host Type. The default choice, DNS Host A, is usually the correct one. Do not choose any of the other host types unless you’re trying to solve a particular problem that a DNS A record won’t accommodate. If your ISP blocks Port 80 for example, and you’re trying to run a webserver or other service on port 80, then you can choose Port 80 Redirect (at that point you’ll be asked to specify the port to use for the redirection).

6. In the field marked IP Address: you should already see your current IP address. If you wish to set the IP address of the host to be somewhere other than your current location, you can enter that address now.

7. When you have filled in the information for your new hostname, simply click the “Create Host” button at the bottom of the page to save it.

8. Download the No-IP Dynamic Update Client. (If your ISP provides you with a static IP address, you can skip this step)

9. If you use a router to connect to the internet and/or have a firewall in place on your computer, you will need to make sure that it is configured to direct the appropriate traffic from the internet into the destination machine on your network. This is done using a router function called Port Forwarding. You can use any port or whatever is specified by the game software. Just be sure that the ports match at the firewall/router. You can visit PortForward.com for step-by-step guides on port forwarding for your specific router.

10. Next, verify that your router and firewall are setup correctly, you can visit our website at www.canyouseeme.org.

11. You’re Done! As long as the port is visible and your hostname resolves back to your network you should be ready to have your friends join you online to play your favorite video game!

It is important to note that depending on which game you are playing, it will either ask for the hostname and port separately, or it will just ask for the host. You may have to have your friends connect as host.domain.com:portnumber

If you run into trouble, be sure to check our Online Support Guides for helpful information, or leave your questions and comments below!

Options, Can Ya Dig it?

  • May 16, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·

There are so many things that you can use Dig for! We are going to show you some of the options you can use to make your queries a little easier to digest.

+short
 Pretty self-explanatory, by adding this to the end of a query, you will only receive the information that you asked for in your answer. So, if you want to know just the MX records of a domain, type the following query into your terminal

dig no-ip.com MX +short

or the NS records
dig no-ip.com NS +short

or just the IP address
dig no-ip.com +short

or the text records
dig no-ip.com TXT +short

+noall +answer or +noall +authority

+noall +answer or +noall +authority will help you get the answers you want, without making your answer as short as +short. You can use +noall +answer or +noall +authority
dig no-ip.com MX +noall +answer
or
dig no-ip.com MX +noall +authority
or  dig no-ip.com (whatever record you are looking for) +noall +answer / +noall +authority

+trace
+trace lists all of the servers the request goes to/through in order to get an answer. Without it, you will just get the answer.
dig google.com +trace

+nssearch
+nssearch will list all of the SOA (start of authority) records of a domain
dig google.com +nssearch

Want to know all of the options?

dig -h will give you the complete list!

Questions or comments? Leave them below!

Best Practices: The Top 4 Ways to Protect a Domain Name

  • May 4, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·

1. Register Your Domain As Private: When you register your domain name you need to provide valid information that will appear in the Whois database. This is mandatory, but who wants the entire world to know their email address and phone number?  Private Registration sets up a proxy where your domain registrar will handle the annoying calls and spam email and forward you the good stuff.  We offer Private Registration for only $9.95 a year, that’s only 83 cents a month!  My privacy is worth 83 cents, is yours?

2.Register Your Domain Under Your Name When you first decide that you need a website for your company, you will probably hire a web developer.  The web developer often registers the domain name for the site as part of their services.  Sometimes, the web developer will register the site in there own name, which can lead to many problems.  If the site is not registered in your name, the person it is registered under has the ability to take down your entire site with the click of a button.  Also, if the site is registered to someone other than you, they will be the ones receiving notice that the domain is expiring, which brings me to point number three.

3. Renew Your Domain On Time The easiest way to combat this issue is to set up your domain to Auto Renew.  If you don’t want to set up Auto Renew, designate a person in your company that is soley in charge of the domains of your company (this way, you will have someone that you can easily blame when they aren’t renewed in time), or set up an ICal Reminder or some other sort of notification so you are aware when your domain is expiring.  If you let your renewal lapse, your domain name can be bought by someone else (your competitor) and it may potenitally be lost forever, unless you are willing to pay a hefty sum for it. According to The Huffington Post, the most expensive domain ever sold was Sex.com and it sold for the low, low cost of 13 million dollars. If your budget isn’t quite that large, don’t forget to renew on time.

4. Keep Your Contact Information Up To Date Point four builds on point three, remember to keep your contact information up to date with your registrar.  If your registrar is sending you expiration emails, but that email is no longer active, your domain registration could lapse unknowingly. You can check what email is on your domain by using Whois.

Do you know any other tips on how to protect your Domain Name? Share them below!

What are MX Records? Anatomy of a DNS Zone File – Part Three

  • April 29, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·
what-are-mx-records-noip

A mail exchange record or MX record is a type of record in a DNS zone file. MX records are responsible for specifying which mail server is in charge of receiving email messages on behalf of a domain. When you send an e-mail, your computer queries the DNS for the MX records of the recipient’s

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Want Email Without the Headache of Managing Your Own Mail Server?

  • April 14, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·

Managing a mail server isn’t for everyone and if you, like myself, are not so technically inclined, then you should definitely consider our POP3/IMAP service.  No-IP’s POP3/IMAP mail service gives you complete email service for your domain, without the headaches or the technical experience that is needed to run your own mail server.

The following are the pros of choosing our POP3/IMAP mail service versus running your own mail server:

1. Control email for your own domain without the cost or hassle of running your own server

2. No need to hire an internal resource to manage your server, with our POP3/IMAP service, all of the technical stuff is handled by us!

3. Travel a lot or work from home? With POP3/IMAP you can access your email anytime and anywhere with webmail!

4. RBL (Realtime Blackhole List) and virus scanning help avoid spam (no not the “meat” in a can) and junk mail

5. Secure back-up capabilities to ensure that none of your emails ever get lost

6. Full control and access to your account to allocate and control memory usage and add/remove users

So, what are you waiting for? Sign Up for our POP3/IMAP service today.  No-IP POP3/IMAP offers tiered accounts for every need, large and small! Questions or comments? Leave them below!

Dig Tutorial

  • April 12, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·

First and foremost, what the heck is Dig? Dig is an acronym for “domain internet groper”.  Dig is a useful tool for webmasters and system administrators, it can be used to query DNS servers and fix DNS related issues.  Dig is a part of the BIND DNS software.

There are many beneficial and useful ways to use dig.  Do you ever find yourself needing to make changes to DNS records, but aren’t sure how to verify your changes?

Check out the following breakdown of a dig query.

Type the following dig query into your Terminal and follow along!

dig www.no-ip.com

This query will call on the A record for the domain name www.no-ip.com.

So, lets dive into this a little deeper and explain what each part of the response means…

The first two lines tell us the version of dig that is being used, in my case, i am using version 9.4.3-P3, the command line parameters (www.no-ip.com) and the query options (printcmd). The printcmd options means that the command section (the name of these first two lines) is printed. You can disable this response by using the option +nocmd.

; <<>> DiG 9.4.3-P3 <<>> www.no-ip.com
;; global options: printcmd

Next, dig tells you the response that it collected from the DNS server. The answer received was (opcode: QUERY) and that the response contains 1 part in the answer section, 5 parts in the authority section and 6 parts in the additional section. Just before those responses you will see “flags”.  Flags state certain things about the DNS server and its response.

-qr (query response) simply means this is a response to a query
-rd (recursion desired) means that the incoming query requested recursive  support
-ra (recursion available) means that the responding server supports recursive queries

;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 55423
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 5, ADDITIONAL: 6

The question section is next. This section just states what I queried, in this case, I queried the A record of www.no-ip.com and it is in the Internet class or IN.

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.no-ip.com.                       IN                  A

The answer section follows; it adds the IP address of www.no-ip.com, and it also names all of the NS records that are authoritative for the domain.

;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.no-ip.com.    60          IN                  A              204.16.252.112
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
no-ip.com. 50531              IN                  NS             ns2.no-ip.com.
no-ip.com. 50531              IN                  NS             ns4.no-ip.com.
no-ip.com. 50531              IN                  NS             ns5.no-ip.com.
no-ip.com. 50531              IN                  NS             ns3.no-ip.com.
no-ip.com. 50531              IN                  NS             ns1.no-ip.com.

The additional section lists the IP addresses of all of the NS records, along with what type of record they are.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.no-ip.com. 7702             IN                  A            204.16.255.55
ns1.no-ip.com. 128              IN                  AAAA         2620:0:2e60::33
ns4.no-ip.com. 128              IN                  A            75.102.60.46
ns2.no-ip.com. 79306            IN                  A            204.16.254.6
ns5.no-ip.com. 79306            IN                  A            75.102.59.82
ns3.no-ip.com. 19260            IN                  A            204.16.253.33

The last section just gives stats about the query: how long it took, the IP address it was queried from and how large the message was.  You can disable this reply by using the +nostats option.

;; Query time: 48 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)
;; WHEN: Fri Apr  8 11:22:02 2011
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 245

Using dig can help you troubleshoot your DNS related issues.  How often do you use dig?

The Anatomy of a DNS Zone File – Part Two: What are NS Records and Why Are They Important to DNS?

  • April 8, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·

An NS record or (name server record) tells recursive name servers which name servers are authoritative for a zone.  Recursive name servers look at the NS records to work out who to ask next when resolving a name. You can have as many NS records as you would like in your zone file.   The

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Transfer Your Go Daddy Domain To Animal Friendly No-IP!

  • March 31, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·

In lieu of recent activities of Bob Parsons, Go Daddy CEO, No-IP is proud to announce that no animals were hurt in the posting of this blog, or the querying of our servers. Have you seen the video? You can check it out here. It’s pretty gruesome, so if you have a weak stomach, don’t say I didn’t warn you…

No-IP loves animals! We love them so much that we are offering domain transfers from Go Daddy to No-IP for only $9.95!  So, what are you waiting for? Transfer your domain to animal friendly No-IP.com today! Enter Promo Code domain995 upon checkout!

Why Reliable DNS is Important To Your Business

  • March 23, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·

Imagine, it’s 8:05am on a Monday morning. You log in to your computer and open up your email client, you read through a couple of emails that you received over the weekend and then you decide to reply to one of them, you hit send and…. NOTHING. The email won’t go out! You frantically pick up your phone and dial your IT department.

Across the country, a potential client who found your web URL on your Facebook page or some other type of advertisement wants to visit your site and see what you have to offer.  They try to type your web URL into their web browser, and…. NOTHING. So, they do a quick Google search and find one of your competitors.  Your competitor’s site is working fine, so they spend their money on that site.

Do these scenarios sound like something you don’t ever want to happen? Well, you better make sure that you have reliable DNS.

DNS is essential for many reasons. When a customer wants to visit your website, they type your Fully Qualified Domain Name, www.yourbusiness.com, into their web browser.  Without DNS, your customers would have to remember the specific IP address (i.e. XX.XX.XX.XX) that your website is listed at.  This could be very difficult, especially if your website has more than one IP address that points to that specific URL.  IP addresses can vary across the globe.  The DNS does all the work by redirecting the users to the correct web address, and making sure they are reaching the site that is hosted nearest to them, thereby ensuring that your customers are connected to your site the fastest way they can be and that traffic is balanced across all of the servers.

The location of DNS servers is important in ensuring 100% uptime. We deploy name servers across the globe at geographically unique datacenters using different tier 1 bandwidth providers to ensure a natural disaster or connectivity outage does not disrupt our robust DNS network.

DNS helps direct your emails to the proper servers, redirect customers to the proper domain and ensures that they reach your site the fastest and best way that they can at all times, even if mother nature decides to rear her ugly head.

How has having reliable DNS helped you in the past?

Common Support Questions and Answers

  • March 18, 2011·
  • by Natalie Goguen·

Common Support Questions

Q: I have No-IP Mail Reflector and a sender is blocked by the RBL I have selected, What should I do?
A: Reflector is configurable and will allow a person or domain to be added to an exception list.

Q: My monitoring system rolls over, but does not affect my host.
A: The host has not been configured. Disable the check, modify the host with your offline option and reenable the monitoring check.

Q: I am using a redirect and my host resolves to a strange IP.
A: This is correct. The first resolution is to a redirect server owned by No-IP, the second request is made by this server combining your IP:port_number.

Q: I purchased No-IP registration for $24.95, but whois says it is not registered.
A: It appears you have purchased DNS without registration. Contact No-IP directly.

Q: When I ping my hostname I get a “connection timed out” error, what’s up with that?
A: A ping request is a valid test for connectivity to a network, but not DNS resolution. So as long as you see that the name resolves to a number, DNS resolution is occurring.

Q: Am I able to get a static IP address?
A: No-IP does not offer static IP addresses, we provide you with a name that will resolve to your current IP address and can be kept updated through the use of our free software.

Q: What’s wrong with the DUC? I keep getting notices that my host will expire.
A: If your IP address does not change within 30 days, then the host is considered abandoned and removed from the account. The DUC checks for a NEW IP address, if the IP hasn’t changed, then no update is submitted. When you upgrade to Plus or Enhanced Managed DNS these notifications are disabled.

Questions, Concerns or Comments? Leave them below!

Having issues with your No-IP service that our Support Center doesn’t cover? Open a Support Request.

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