- What is dy.fi?
dy.fi is a site offering
free Dynamic DNS services for Finnish users.
- What is Dynamic DNS?
dy.fi's offering of Dynamic DNS lets you set up up to five DNS names
under the .dy.fi domain and point these names to your computer's IP
address(es), or to a web site. You can easily and automatically change
the name to point to your computer's new address whenever it changes.
The service is good for running a web or file server on a home computer
which has a dynamic IP address and a long, hard-to-type domain name
which changes whenever the IP address changes. You can keep the same
.dy.fi name pointing to whatever your IP address happens to be at the time.
Alternatively, you can point the short dy.fi name to your web site
which has a long and un-cool URL. In case you need to move your site
to another server, you can easily point to the dy.fi name to the new
address and avoid any lost visitors.
The two functions are combined - while a dy.fi name is not pointed
to your home IP address, web browsers will be forwarded to your
home page's URL, if one is configured.
As a new feature we also support MX records for email routing
and IPv6 AAAA records for those of you living on the edge.
- How much does it cost?
Nothing. dy.fi is free, for the time being. It is run as a hobby,
with minimal running costs and no profits.
- I have a question / problem. What can I do?
If you have trouble using the service, please ask the community first (someone
else who is using dy.fi), they're probably able to help. Because the
service is easy to use, we have been able to respond to the small amount
of feedback so far.
Common questions will be answered in this FAQ document.
- dy.fi doesn't work! It's broken!
I've found a bug! / I've got an idea!
If it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. There is no guarantee
that it works or is available. You can report bugs or outages
using the feedback page,
and we will try to resolve any problems as soon as possible.
You can send in feature requests and ideas for
development, too - if they're good and not too hard to implement,
we just might implement them some day!
- I'm not located in Finland. Why can't I use dy.fi?
· dy.fi, like .fi altogether, is targeted at Finnish users.
· We specifically want to limit the amount of potential users. We have limited resources.
· We want to limit the amount of potential abuse cases.
Finnish abusers are easier to locate, and it's easier for
the police to get them (if they're really bad).
There are a bunch of dynamic DNS providers offering their services
to the whole world, just type 'dynamic dns' in
Google to find them.
- I'm located in Finland. Why does dy.fi claim I'm not?
When you try to create an account or point a hostname to your IP address, we check the
address against the RIPE database.
RIPE is the authority which deals IP addresses to users (ISPs,
companies and other organisations connected to the Internet) in Europe.
To be able to use dy.fi, your IP address must be registered in
the RIPE database to be used in Finland - "country" must be set to "FI"
in the "inetnum" object. Type your IP address to the
RIPE Whois
lookup tool to get the inetnum object from the RIPE database.
The RIPE database does not accurately reflect reality. For example, a
British organisation could register a large block of addresses
and have country: set to GB, and then use a small part
of that address space in their Finnish office. It could happen the
other way around, too. We don't care about this small inaccuracy,
if RIPE's information is inaccurate for you, too bad.
We update our copy of the RIPE database weekly, new allocations will
start working on monday morning.
- I need to know who used this dy.fi name at a given time.
Use the lookup page to check which IP
address the name was mapped to at the time. We do not know who
used that address at the time, to get that information you need to
look at the RIPE information
(RIPE Whois)
to find out the ISP or company that is using the range of addresses.
If a dy.fi user has abused you, your options are:
· Talk to the ISP's abuse department. They might want to
talk to their customer if the customer is doing nasty things. They
might even cut the customer's contract and have him find a new ISP
if this is not the first time he's violating the contract. But the
ISP is probably not allowed to tell you the identity of the customer
(thanks to strict privacy laws in Finland).
· If the abuse is really serious, talk to the police. With the
logs, timestamps and IP address information they can, with the
ISP's help, find the miscreant and bust him.
dy.fi cannot help you with the above steps, the only thing we really
know about each user is their IP address. We are not responsible for
their actions.
- How fast do dy.fi updates take place?
The quick answer: Within seconds, typically.
The technical answer: The update is typically sent to our nameservers
within about 5 seconds. We use a TTL of 30 seconds and a negative TTL
of 5 seconds, so name servers cache successful queries of dy.fi names
for 30 seconds, and failed queries for 5 seconds.
So, if you ask for
a name which is not pointed at an address, the "host not found" result
is cached for a minute at your resolving nameserver. If you point
the host during this time, you will see the update after one minute.
If you unpoint the hostname, or point it to a new address, it will take
a couple minutes for the change to take place everywhere.
Changes to URL forwarding are applied in real time.
- I am using a web proxy, and my dy.fi name points to the IP address of the proxy.
If the proxy is configured in your web browser, add the dy.fi domain to the
list of bypassed domains ("no proxy for..."). If you are behind a so-called
transparent proxy, surf to the dy.fi service using an SSL encrypted secure
connection at the URL https://www.dy.fi/
or to the plaintext high port at
http://www.dy.fi:8180/.
- My email address is changing. How do I update
the new address in the dy.fi service?
The best way to change your email address is the following:
- Sign up to the service with your new email address, like any new user.
- Once the new user account has been activated, log in again with your
old email address and delete the old account. This will automatically
release and delete the dy.fi names reserved with the old account, so it is
not necessary to delete them by hand.
- Log in again with your new email address and reserve your dy.fi
names again.
- When are unused hosts released and deleted, and how about unused accounts?
If a host is not refreshed for 7 days, it is released (the DNS record
is removed from the dy.fi zone). If URL forwarding has been configured,
forwarding will be enabled at this point.
After a host name has not been used at all for 30 days, it will be deleted
and will be available for other users to take. Web browsers hitting the
URL forwarding will reset this timer.
After an user account has not been used (logged in on the dy.fi web
site, or used to refresh a host) for 60 days, and there are no more
names allocated, it will be deleted.
- How do I use the dy.fi service with my own domain?
dy.fi currently only offers names from a single domain, but nothing prevents
you from making a name in your own domain an alias for a dy.fi name! Simply
reserve a dy.fi name, and add a line like this in your own zone file:
- myname.mydomain.org. IN CNAME myname.dy.fi.
From now on all queries for myname.mydomain.org. will return the IP address
that myname.dy.fi. points to at the given moment. This trick currently
does not work with URL forwarding!
- How do I change my reverse DNS information? How do I
make my dy.fi name seen as my host on IRC?
Reverse zone information can only be changed by the organisation
that the given range of IP addresses has been assigned to, which
makes a lot of sense in the security point of view.
Businesses and larger organisations can either manage their
reverse information themselves or instruct their ISPs to change the
information as they like, but individual consumers with dynamic
IP addresses and cheap lines are typically not given this opportunity.
Thus, dy.fi can't help you either.
The reason for ISPs not supporting dynamic reverse updates is
simply the low demand and even lower willingness of customers
to pay the cost of developing a scalable and secure name
allocation and updating system. Some smaller ISPs have offered
this service, though, typically together with static IPs.