I have a domain which I’m now managing via desec.io, and have separately set up a desec subdomain (route.dedyn.io) to forward traffic to my home setup using the ddclient service built into OPNSense.
My question is, what is the correct way to start forwarding web traffic for my ‘real’ domain to a site I’m hosting locally? Is it possible to set up a second instance of ddclient pointing at that real domain, and your service will take care of updating my A record? Or should I be forwarding that real domain to a subdomain of route.dedyn.io?
Sorry for the probable noob question; very excited to start hosting my web sites from home!
First of all the term route is somewhat misleading here. deSEC is a DNS service. It deals (mainly) with translating hostnames to IP addresses.
In the networking world the term route is usually used for the ISO layer 3 process of directing IP packets to the correct destinations. DNS is not involved in this at all.
The way I understand your question is that you want to run a web server at home and use hostnames from your real domain?
Let’s call this real domain example.com. here. So e.g. www.example.com. should point to route.dedyn.io., which is updated to contain the correct A record when your public IP at home changes, correct?
You can do this by defining a CNAMEwww.example.com. pointing to route.dedyn.io.. Likewise for any other subdomains in example.com. that you want to point to your home.
The only caveat is that you can not use a CNAME at the domain apex, i.e. example.com. Solutions for this may partially exist. But they may require the support of the web clients and add a certain amount of complexity to the setup. It would advise against trying to solve that problem if you don’t have a really pressing need to do so.
You could also use a DDNS client to update records directly in example.com. but you should then ask for the minimum timeout (TTL) for the domain to be reduced to one minute. (This is something dedyn.io. subdomains get automatically. But for other domains the default is 1 hour.) If you choose this path then you may not even need the route.dedyn.io. domain.
See: Domain Management and look for minimum_ttl
Cool, I didn’t know that. Should cut down on support requests
@diem This would make it even easier to just set up your Internet router to update your main domain (example.com.) directly — unless there is some other reason for wanting to use route.dedyn.io.?
Indeed I’ve no reason to send traffic via route.dedyn.io - this was just my ignorance based on what I had set up before.
I’ve added a ddns config in OPNSense for the domain epocfaq.co.uk and I’m now hosting from my home a site I first published over 20 years ago. The internet is a wonderful thing
