Site Went Down, Here's Why...

[Tony]

I'm sure most of you know, I host this website from my house now on my personal server. At your house, you have (likely) a DHCP Lease for the IP address you use. This means you are in a pool, and it rotates when the lease expires and you get a new IP address. This is what happened last night.

The easy solution would be to get a static IP address, but my ISP wants just a bit too much money for a static IP address. So every now and then, I will have to manually update the IP address when it switches over.

I may have to break down and just get the static IP, but I really do not want to lol.

 

[Zermelo]

I don't know what router you use but many decent routers support DDNS (Dynamic DNS) which essentially checks in with an external website to update the IP address. I use no-ip.com. It let's you use have up to 3 hosts names for free. I couldn't imagine having to manually update my ip address when I want to connect to my personal VPN server.

Also, if your router supports DD-WRT, that firmware also supports DDNS. Also Chickenkiller.com is also a FREE dynamic DNS service.

No need to pay the ISP for a static ip. Also if your router does not support DDNS, you can download a small client on your server that can also upload the ip information to the servers mentioned above. Lots of ways to get around this issue.

 

[Tony]

My router does support it, and I am running DD-WRT, however this router is weird, and the config likes to reset every now and then. Main reason I have not taken the time to setup DDNS at this point. I do have plans on upgrading my network and getting away with the "home gamer" setup for my router, adn going with something a little more substantial and safe. At this point, it seems my ip address changes every 3-6 months, depending on if my router or media converter power cycles. My ISP is pretty awesome about leaving the lease and not resetting it.

In all honesty, I have just been lazy in doing some things due to some issues I'm having here at home and just flat not having a lot of time on my hands. But give me a little time, and we will get this issue worked out and solved. Even though I did know about what you posted, thank you for all the suggestions.

 

[Tony]

Well, here we are again. This time, the outage was caused by the power going out this morning, and even though I use a UPS which is also a surge protector, it killed a couple ports on my router. Not a big deal right... Well, instead of going into town and getting a new router (My next router will be a UDM Pro, so didn't want to dump the same amount of money on another "home gamer" router), I decided to fire up my pfSense router on my server.

The issue is, when the power outage took out the ports, it also reset the config on the router, so I could not see what I had done to the router, and I have the memory of a goldfish (ask @RandyDSok), so I had to trial and error it.

Turns out, I had everything correct, but pfSense is stupid on how they do their NAT and DNS and it took me all day to figure out what needed to be done just to get the site back up and running.

So I'm saving all my pennies to upgrade my router and switch which in turn will also upgrade my surveillance system over time (the Ubiquity cameras are friggin expensive!!!) as well as provide a much more secure network for my family.

I do apologize the site went down, I'm slowly getting to the point where I can solve these issues just a little faster each time lol. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

 

[Tony]

Okay, I once again apologize about the site going down there for a couple hours. I decided to go ahead and build a cheap server rack, and I wanted to mount everything in it so that I could stop the ever present collapse of the way it was. And trust me, it was sketchy as hell!!! lol.

So I built the rack, it's 6' tall, but I only put 20u worth of rail in it, and installed everything into it, including both of my servers, my new switch, my new router and mounted my access point to it as well as my media converter to convert my fiber internet into copper.

And man does it look so much better! Now I just need to figure out how to wire manage this monstrosity as there are a TON of cables running on this thing....

 

[Tony]

Alright, I closed the site so that we could get the article section back up and running, but I waited 3 days, and have not heard anything about the article update, so I'm opening the site back up. I guess we will just not have an article section and have a bunch of broke links everywhere.... sorry guys.