Name service over Cable Modem.

Since I use RCN as my cable provider, I get my IP address via DHCP. In practice, my address seems to last for at least 8 months. Internally, the lease for the address gets renewed every couple of hours. If you do have some sort of statically allocated address, you can go ahead and host your own nameserver. Otherwise, You need someone else to host your DNS for you.

Update: RCN now has what they call static addresses for sale. This is not a static address in the true sense of the word. It's just an address from their dynamic pool of addresses but they promise to always give you that same address every time you request.

In addition, the politics are such that RCN blocks incoming port 80 and outgoing port 25. In English, this means that they are blocking you from running a web server and from running and SMTP server to deliver your own mail. I pay their extorion fee of $20/month extra because in addition to the static address, they also open up the web and mail ports.

I use an outfit called zoneedit.com. There are a bunch of free dns provideres out there. Zoneedit is almost free.

The first thing you need to do is to transfer the DNS of your new domain to zoneedit from godaddy. This could take a couple of days.

The way zoneedit works is that they will host up to five domains for free. After that you have to pay a ridiculously small fee. Also, zoneedit supports your MX record (some of the other guys only do that for a fee). But the nice thing that they offer is a backup MX record for $10.

This means that if someone tries to send you mail and it fails for any reason (e.g., your computer is down, or even your ISP is down) they will intercept the mail until you're back up.

BTW, the $10 they charge covers you to the tune of 120Meg of mail traffic. i.e., if they end up holding 120 Meg of mail in total, then your $10 is declared to be used up and you have to buy a new credit. I've been running on one credit for almost two years now and I'm not even close to running out. Also, the free DNS they supply is actually for 120 Meg of DNS activity. I expect to run out of MailBackup ten time faster than I run out of my free DNS credit.

So here's how it works:

• You go to zoneedit.com and create an account for yourself. In that account, you purchase one zone credit. Buy more if you like, but the one I bought is still active after almost two years.
• Create the list of names and addresses you need in the A record.
• Set up the MX record for yourself. Go ahead and request the backup mail service.
• Go ahead and create any aliases you may want in the CNAME record.
• The last thing is to create a WebForward for youself. I need this because RCN has (apparently) shut off port 80. So I get around it by telling my web server to listen on port 8080 and then use zoneedit's WebForward to forward to my machine at that port. If your cable provider has not shut port 80 off, feel free to disregard this whole section.

The details of how it all works are below. I'm only showing what I do so you can see by example how to do it. (Some of this is not too obvious.)

My machine is called saturn and my domain is syslang.net. I run three virtual hosts for seperate web pages on top of the domain itself. So the three virtual hosts are frambors2, steveo2 and www2. They are where you get to if you try to get the web pages that are at frambors, steveo and www, respectively. So the recap is like this. You want to go visit https://syslang.net/ and the host resolves to some ZoneEdit address. When you get there, they automatically forward the request to http://www2.syslang.net:8080/ and everything just goes normally after that.

And for all of the above to work, all you have to do is to create three WebForwards exactly like the first one above is described.

In addition, I have a CNAME called saturn.syslang.net which points to syslang.net.