Many people use dynamic dns for different purposes. I use it to give my home machine a public presence. I choose DynDNS for my needs. Its a leader in this segment and have been around for a long time.

First, you’ll need to register for a free account at their site. Once you’ve chosen a domain name and setup your details, you’ll need a dynamic dns client to update your IP, which probably changes every time you sign on to your ISP.

I use inadyn, a free dynamic dns update client that works in linux.

The Inadyn package name is inadyn-mt. Install inadyn using yum:

yum install inadyn-mt

Then edit the /etc/inadyn.conf file with your details.

Then turn on the service.

service inadyn start

Check /var/log/messages. you should get some entires showing whether you edited the config file properly, and the update was successful.

Jul 10 22:50:43 atom INADYN[8251]: Fri Jul 10 22:50:43 2009: I:INADYN: Alias 'your-hostname.dyndns.org' to IP '12.34.56.78' updated successfully.

Once you know the client works, dont forget to turn it on permanently on startup.

chkconfig inadyn on