Last night dy.fi was moved to a new small virtual server instance. In the process all 3rd party components were upgraded to current versions. Even the operating system got changed from Solaris to Linux. Thank you, Sun and Oracle, for all these years with advanced container technology, which is now getting to mainstream on Linux.

As a side effect the captcha on the sign-up page works again. Feedback form got a brand new captcha too, thanks to all the spam flowing in through it.

TLS / https is now enforced more widely on the site.

dy.fi was moved to a new physical server tonight. 32G RAM, whee! Several major software components were also upgraded or completely changed. For example, Apache is out, nginx is in.

The following recently reported bugs have been fixed: history lookups, tiny URL bookmarklet encoding bug, email alias adding. The checkip service has been reimplemented with maximum performance in mind.

Bug reports are welcome - I'm certain something is still broken after the upgrade, I just don't know what. The upgrade caused an outage of almost two hours. Sorry about that!

The maintenance tasks were completed during Saturday morning. The database engine was upgraded, and some security related enhancements were made. For example, the password storage scheme was upgraded to use use the PBKDF2 algorithm with HMAC-SHA256. The algorithm makes dictionary attacks against a stolen password database very slow. This will better protect your passwords if the user database of dy.fi would be compromised (which happened recently to a couple of Finnish sites). I don't expect it to happen, but it's good security design to have multiple layers of protection.

Some maintenance tasks like database engine and software upgrades will be performed between Friday 16th and Sunday 18th of April, 2010.

Some of the maintenance tasks will require the service to be taken offline, and the dy.fi service might be down for up to a couple hours per outage.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

dy.fi is yet again taking part in Assembly by providing a dynamic DNS service for the PartyNet. Because the service is supported by the Assembly NetCrew, it can even update the reverse DNS mappings, so that the name selected by the user is shown as his hostname on IRC and other services.

Once you're connected to the PartyNet, your DNS name can be updated at http://dy.asm.fi/.

One of dy.fi's nameservers served old data for the second half of the christmas week. It's configuration was broken after a power failure. The problem has been fixed today.

We sincerely apologize for any trouble caused by the outage, and wish you a peaceful christmas, and a safe new year!

The following .be domains will be removed from the dy.fi service during October 2006 due to little use:

The following .be domains will remain available:

.be domains were added to the dy.fi service as a trial in November 2005, when the .be registry made them freely available for a perioid of one year. They will start charging for the domains now, and to reduce running costs we will not renew the domains which have very little or no users.

dy.fi is again taking part in Assembly by providing a dynamic DNS service for the PartyNet. Because the service is supported by the Assembly NetCrew, it can even update the reverse DNS mappings, so that the name selected by the user is shown as his hostname on IRC and other services.

Once you're connected to the PartyNet, your DNS name can be updated at http://dy.asm.fi/.

We will be relocating the dy.fi main servers to a new hosting facility today (20th of June, 2006). The move will cause an outage in the service, which will last between 1 and 2 hours somewhere between 5 and 10 PM. During the outage the dy.fi DNS servers will operate normally, but it will not be possible to make changes in the DNS information. Email forwarding and URL redirection will be down, too.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the move.

During the Easter holiday a new feature was born: email forwarding from dy.fi names to arbitrary email addresses.

Assuming you're in control of the names name.dy.fi and example.com, you can forward any email address under those names (your.name@name.dy.fi, root@example.com) to your real email address (for example, your.name@gmail.com).

To use this service, select the dy.fi email forwarding service from the name's options, under the heading e-mail routing (MX), and create your aliases using the email aliases link. The delivery address of an email alias must be a registered user of dy.fi when the alias is created.

We have created a handy bookmarklet, which creates a tiny dy.fi URL of the currently viewed page with a single click of the mouse. Drag the bookmarklet to your favourites, bookmarks or toolbar from the instructions page!

More information on Bookmarklets can be found on Wikipedia.

As the Belgian .be registry is giving out domain names for free (for the first year only!), you can now choose from 10 additional .be domains for your free dy.fi name. If some of these domain names turn out to be popular during the year, dy.fi will keep a couple of the most popular ones registered. The rest will be not be renewed.

· sivu.be · nopee.be · hidas.be · bileet.be · teho.be ·
· synti.be · paavi.be · sukkaa.be · gurut.be ·
· the-half-a.be (for the Monty Python fans out there) ·

If you would prefer some other .be domain name instead of the ones registered by dy.fi, you can always register the domain yourself (for free), and host it on the dy.fi DNS servers (for free, as in beer)!

We now offer free domain hosting of domains registered by users. Each user can host up to 2 domains on the dy.fi servers. Check out the documentation and try out the new service, it's really easy!

The dy.fi site news are now available as an RSS 2.0 feed at http://www.dy.fi/rss/news_fi.xml (Finnish) and http://www.dy.fi/rss/news_en.xml (English).

The URL forwarding and tiny URL features now permit specifying a port number in the URL (for example, http://server.example.com:8080/). This enables forwarding to a server even though the commonly used low service ports (80, 443, etc) are firewalled by the service provider.

We also made some small documentation updates and fixed a long-standing bug in our email system. More details in the change log.

The dy.fi service was moved to a new server tonight. The new server hardware is a highly available 4-CPU, 4 GB memory system with RAID1 mirrored disks. The DNS service worked without any degradation during the maintenance break. URL forwarding of dy.fi hostnames was down between 18:53 and 18:56 UTC. Updates and the WWW service was closed between 18:27 and 18:56 UTC.

We sincerely apologize any trouble caused by the service migration.

We have recently implemented support for multiple domain names. As the first additional domain we present tunk.org, names in this new domain can be reserved now. Suggestions for additional domains are happily accepted via the feedback page, although we make no promise at fulfilling every request. Domain names cost money, and our advertising revenues aren't exactly drowning us into cash. 8)

You can now easily track the amount of visitors your dy.fi-named web page gets over time! After logging in, click on the stats link below your reserved name, and you get access to graphs showing the amount of unique visitors and amount of visits per day or month. If you wish to visualize the statistics yourself, the raw data can also be downloaded in XML or Excel-supported CSV format.

The statistics are only available for names which are forwarded to an URL.

More from the Department of Interesting Statistics: most popular URL forwarded hostnames and latest reserved names. Naturally, only names marked as public are shown in these lists.

Ever wondered how often the dynamic IP address given by an ISP actually changes? From now on we publish a per-ISP chart showing how often our users get different IP addresses on different ISPs.

Support for MX records (used for email routing) and IPv6 AAAA records has now been implemented in the service. The records can be configured on the host options page.

dy.fi moved to a new hosting location on tuesday, 25th of January. The move caused an outage to the web service, DNS updates and URL redirection. The distributed nameservers were available - all names that had been reserved and pointed to an IP address continued to work over the outage.

The URL forwarding feature has been improved substantially. It can now be used for permanently pointing your short dy.fi name to your home page which resides on your ISP's web server, or on a free server such as Geocities. We have updated our service description and other documentation accordingly.

We have also made the TTL values used in the dy.fi zone much shorter, which will result in faster propagation of DNS updates.

It is now possible to change a forgotten password to a new one in a secure way. Click 'forgot password?' on the front page, fill in your email address and click on the 'Send code' button. We'll email you a one-time secret link which you can use to change your password for a new one.

A link can not be sent to an email address which has already received one. The feature can only be used by accounts which have been activated using the email address verification code.

You can now point all possible subdomains (for example foo.name.dy.fi, whatever.name.dy.fi) at once using a wildcard record, for example *.name.dy.fi. A wildcard may only exist in the beginning of a name.

This feature has been implemented due to popular demand from our users. Feedback is welcome!

We are delighted to note that we have grown past 500 registered users. There are over 800 reserved names already!

The new version 1.2.0 of dyfi-update.pl can automatically release hostnames when the machine (or just the script) is being shut down. This way the hostname will not be left pointing to an unused IP address, and if the offline URL is configured, web browsers will be redirected to another site. The releasing feature can be enabled in the configuration file. Thanks for the patch go to Asko Leivonmäki.

The version also includes significant fixes in the installation Makefile, handling of the lock/PID file and handling of error codes from the dy.fi service.

You can now reserve names containing international characters (like åäö). These names are automatically encoded into IDNA Punycode. IDNA names only work in modern web browsers, so they are not always a good choice. In other applications you need to use the encoded format (for example, ö.dy.fi => xn--nda.dy.fi).

You can now configure an offline URL for each host. If the host is not pointing to an IP address at the given moment, and the hostname is requested by a web browser, the browser will be redirected to the offline URL. The feature is most useful when used with update client software which is able to release the hostname when the computer is shutting down.

The /nic/update API has been upgraded to support releasing of a hostname using the URL parameter 'offline=yes'. The API specification has been updated accordingly.

Whee! The new XHTML/CSS site design by Hannu Luhtasela has been installed. Cute, isn't it? If you find any bugs, please let us know through the feedback page!

Thank you, Hannu, and everyone else who submitted designs.

A new version of dyfi-update.pl has been made available on the clients page. We recommend everyone using dyfi-update.pl to upgrade to the new version.

Version 1.1.0 includes:

- A good amount of documentation to help new users
- An easy way to install the script and make it run automatically at boot
- Important protection against accidentally running multiple copies of the daemon
- A bugfix against a busyloop lockup when starting from an init script at bootup

The visitors of the Assebly LAN party were able to change their DNS hostnames using a modified version of the dy.fi service. Because the service was supported by the Assembly NetCrew, it could even update the reverse DNS mappings, so that the name selected by the user was shown as his hostname on IRC and other services.

A significant defect in the dy.fi name reservation policy has now been fixed. All subdomains of a given name are now reserved to the holder of the name.

If an user reserves the name 11.aa.dy.fi, only he is allowed to reserve the names foo.11.aa.dy.fi and bar.11.aa.dy.fi.

Another user may still reserve aa.dy.fi, but he will not be able to reserve names under 11.aa.dy.fi until it is deleted by the original owner (or deleted because of inactivity).

As some of you might have noticed, graphic web design is not actually the thing that dy.fi administrators are good at. The site is currently quite boring and simple.

So, this is where you can help. We hereby open a public web design competition, where the aim is to design a new good look for dy.fi.

The rules and instructions can be found on the GUI compo page (currently only in Finnish)!

Recent versions of DynSite for Windows, which can be downloaded at the address http://noeld.com/dynsite.asp, contain built-in support for dy.fi. Instructions on the client software page have been updated accordingly. Installation is now easy enough for the average monkey to complete it successfully.

A total of 200 users have now signed up on the dy.fi web site. The first bunch of unused names have been released and deallocated automatically, and some common words ending in 'dy' are now available again.

The graphs are now updated automatically every night.

After three weeks from the opening of the service a total of 150 users have registered and reserved 230 hostnames. About 120 names are currently in use (pointed to an IP address), so some name squatting has taken place. We are following the progress using graphs created by cricket.

A couple of users have asked for a possibility to update reverse DNS information (which is visible as your host on IRC, for example). Unfortunately, this is not possible without significant co-operation from your ISP. This is now documented in our FAQ.

On the other hand, it is possible to point names under your own domain to a dynamic IP address with the help of dy.fi!

A rather stupid bug in hostname validity code was fixed: the '-' character is now permitted to appear within names (though not right after or just before a dot).

Also, Axis network cameras now work with dy.fi, please see the configuration instructions!

There are now around 90 dy.fi users who have reserved over 140 names. Not a huge number, but certainly more than was expected! Not much feedback has been received, so we are under the impression that the service does work for most of the users. 8-)

DynSite for Windows, which can be downloaded at the address http://noeld.com/dynsite.asp, can be easily configured to support dy.fi. Instructions have beed added to the client software page.

The dyfi.dns file, which defines our service's parameters, has been sent to the author of DynSite in hope that support will be included in future versions of the software.

After a few months of slow, careful development, the dy.fi service is ready to be published. Over time, the service will be further developed based on user feedback.

Welcome!