Dynamic DNS on my Tomato Router

Here is the problem statement - now that I had my router running a custom TomatoUSB build, I wanted to open it up to the Internet so that I could access my music and data from anywhere.

The first step though, was to establish a way to address my router via the Internet. Now, I get a dynamic IP address from my ISP; so I had to find a way to keep track of the latest address. The answer, of course, was to use a dynamic DNS (DDNS) solution, of which there are dozens available. But as it turned out, my case was more complicated than that.

I chose the FreeDNS service offered by afraid.org. Tomato firmware has native support for their dynamic DNS service built in. But more importantly the tagline on their website read “Why is it free? It's quite simple. We wanted a challenge... that's it.”.

To set my site up, I had to delegate the nameserver function for my domain to my hosting provider. My initial idea was to delegate a subdomain to the FreeDNS service, and then update the IP address directly from my router. Unfortunately my hosting provider did not allow delegation of sub-domains to a different DNS provider. In other words, they did not allow NS records to be created for their inconsequential customers like me. They only allowed A, TXT or CNAME records. CNAME records - that gave me a way out.

I created a sub-domain on one of the free domains provided by the FreeDNS service - in my case it was mooo.com. The name of the sub-domain did not really matter, any available one worked just fine. Then I set up my Tomato router to update the IP address of this sub-domain automatically.

Finally, I set-up a CNAME pointing a sub-domain from anarchius.org to the newly created sub-domain on mooo.com. Presto - sub-domain.anarchius.org now resolved to my WAN IP address. Here is how my DNS records look now:

There you are, Dynamic DNS on my Tomato router up and running, linked directly to my own domain. Bring on the possibilities.