Domain Name for your Home Computer

There is a better solution than remembering your home IP address when you need to log into your home server. (I suggest OwnCloud). A long string of numbers is forgettable and changeable! You do not want to hard code your server address as an IP that will change and need to be updated. Here is the better solution.

(1) dot.tk – You can get a free domain name from here. The domains are funky (.tk, .ga, and others) but you can point your domain name to a DNS server.

(2) namecheap.com – With your domain name, you can create an account and tell namecheap’s DNS servers to resolve your home IP address. I set up my “www” and “@” hosts.

(3) When your home IP address changes, go to namecheap and update the record with your new IP address. All your devices referencing your domain name will continue working after this update.

(4) Set up automatic DNS updates. Your computer can tells namecheap to update the domain name automatically when your computer senses an IP address change. (More details coming when I implement this.)

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3 Responses to Domain Name for your Home Computer

  1. Pingback: Moving OwnCloud to a new home | Man and Keyboard

  2. Arif says:

    Hi There – I am completely new to Owncloud. I want to be able to sync my files between my work computer and home computer both running windows. My website hosting provider provides owncloud setup, which I have installed already. However, I don’t want to store anything on their servers. Will Owncloud on hosting provider point to the hard drives on my computers or will it save the files on the hosting provider? How can I achieve what I intend to here. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks.

    • Brian_Goodacre says:

      If you are running OwnCloud on a website hosting provider, you would need to somehow create a symbolic link from the /data directory of the hosting provider to your laptop. I am not familiar with creating links over SFTP but you can look into that.

      The better solution is to use a DNS to point to your home and then run your own server on an old computer.

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