09:30 AM: This morning, I received an email from dyndns.org, warning that my account with them would be deleted unless I followed the provided link, which was to confirm that I still wished to keep the account, as well as to remove the inactivity flag they’d recently placed on the account. If there’s no activity for thirty days, they deem the account inactive, and since this is a free account, they delete it within a week afterward unless they hear from its owner through this confirmation process.
I do in fact, want to retain this account, because it enables me to log into this computer while I’m traveling, without having to know its current IP address. I ust access it through the qualified domain name at DynDNS.org.
So, I followed the link, and got a message in my web browser, saying that my account would not be deleted. But, it also said that in order for me to retain the account indefinitely without being pestered to re confirm it each month, I should either upgrade to a pro (read that, PAID) account, or make sure to keep some activity going on the free account.
I wondered at this, because they said that routine client update requests sent periodically from their updater client program (which I run on this computer all the time) are enough to keep the account in active standing. But even with the updater running, for some reason, they deemed my account inactive.
To investigate the matter, I hovered the mouse pointer over the DynDNS updater icon that always shows up in the notification area of my task bar (I’m running Windows XP). Doing this brings up a status balloon message that shows when the last IP address update to dyndns.org occurred and whether or not it was successful. My message indicated that the last successful update had occurred some three months ago, in January. Curious.
So, I went to http://dyndns.org/ and successfully logged into my account. This meant that the user Id and password I had on file were correct. To my knowledge, these were also the ones I used when I first set up the client updater program on this computer.
Next, I opened the updater configuration window. Immediately, an error message window appeared over top of that one, saying that user authentication had failed.
This got me to thinking that somehow, the user id and password saved in this window when I first installed this program had become corrupted. But when I pulled up the “Change user” window, the correct user Id displayed. However, as per good security precautions, the saved password did not appear. So to eliminate the possibility that the password was corrupt, I tabbed into that field (edit box) and set it to what it is at dyndns.org, and saved. However, the error appeared again the next time I ran the configuration utility.
I noticed however, that my version of the DynDNS client program was old. So I updated to version 4.1.5, the latest version as of today. Still though, this program could not successfully log into DynDNS to update my IP address.
I wasn’t sure what to do at this point, and toyed with the idea of emailing their support address, asking for assistance. But I wasn’t quite ready to give up just yet. After all, I’d only spent ten minutes on the problem so far, and I’m usually good for at least an hour or two, wheel-spinning on my own, before frustration forces me to throw in the towel. Besides, responses to such email requests often come only after days, and I hate waiting around for them if there’s something I can do by myself to fix things sooner.
So, on a hunch, I went back into the change-user option, and re-entered my user Id and password, then saved. This time, I retyped both the fields (user Id and password). I don’t know why or how, but this seems to have solved the updater issue, as I subsequently got a successful update message, dated today. Perhaps resaving the entire user record overwrote any corruption so that now, my DynDNS client is working correctly.
Since it updates every few days, I should no receive those periodic email messages, asking me to confirm that my account is still active. Nice.
This raises another question though. My NetGear ProSafe firewall supports DynDNS. So when I first started using this dynamic IP address domain name service (DynDNS), I configured my DynDNS user ID and password into the firewall as well. The aim was to have the firewall send the updates so that I would not have to run the client program on this PC. But apparently, the NetGear isn’t updatig either. So I’ll check into that. Eventually though, I’d like to get the firewall to perform these updates so as to have one less program running on the computer here. Stay tuned.
Tom Hesley
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I’ll write about the experience at some point, should inspiration to do so encourage me.