Does Virtualmin play nice with Dynamic DNS?

[jsigned]

My ISP charges more than I want to pay for a static IP address. So I have set my router up to automatically update my registrar every time the address changes. Does Virtualmin need to be updated with the changes too? If so is there an automatic way to do that?

[RJM_Web_Design]

I’ve never used it, but…

Virtualmin > Addresses and Networking > Dynamic IP Update

I suppose it might also be possible to assign the server a static local IP and configure port forwarding in the router, and let a dynamic DNS service keep track of the public IP address. But I’ve never done that with Virtualmin, either.

I did it for years with a live video feed generated by ffserver running on CentOS locally, and pulled by a public CentOS server for distribution; so I know it’s doable in principle. I had NO-IP handle the DNS and the router forward the requests to the local server running the video feed. The public server would call the domain via SSH to remotely start the feed, and then it would pull the video and distribute it. Worked fine for about 10 years.

I have never tried it with Virtualmin, however.

Richard

[jsigned]

Well, I have the Virtualmin server living on a DMZ with a 192.168.x.x IP address and the router is doing NAT port forwarding for ports 80 and 443 and everything works fine with the “hello world” pages currently there. When I move the real sites over I’m not sure what will happen if the external address is different than what Virtualmin thinks it is.

[RJM_Web_Design]

I really don’t know, having never tried it. But if it has a 192.168.x.x static IP, I can’t think of a reason why it would care about the public IP as long as DNS is being provided externally.

Since Virtualmin does have DynDNS support, however, that may be a simpler solution. I say “may” because I’ve never tried it. I also wonder whether it would have to re-write all the “A” entries in /etc/named.conf and restart BIND whenever the IP changes, which I think would cause propagation delays and client-side caching problems unless the TTL’s were set very short.

Or maybe not. I really don’t know enough about it to say anything authoritative. This is just some shared speculation.

When I was in a similar position (albeit not using Virtualmin), however, I used external DDNS and port forwarding with great success. I’d still try Virtualmin’s built-in DDNS support first, but I’d also keep the external DNS and port-forwarding in my back pocket as a fallback solution.

Richard