DynDNS updates to your Cloud DNS
Sunday, April 15. 2018
People running servers at home always get dynamic IP-addresses. Most ISPs have a no-servers -clause in their terms of contract, but they really don't enforce the rule. If you play a multiplayer on-line game and have voice chat enabled, you're kinda server already, so what's a server is very difficult to define.
Sometimes the dynamic IP-address does what dynamic things do, they change. To defeat this, people have had number of different approaches to solve the problem. For example, I've ran a DHIS-server (for details, see: https://www.dhis.org/) and appropriate client counterpart to make sure my IP-address is properly updated if/when it changes. Then there are services like Dyn.com or No-IP to do exactly the same I did with a free software.
The other day I started thinking:
I'm already using Rackspace Cloud DNS as it's free-of-charge -service. It's heavily cloud-based, robust and has amazing API to do any maintenance or updates to it. Why would I need to run a server to send obscure UDP-packets to to keep my DNS up-to-date. Why cannot I simply update the DNS-record to contain the IP-address my server has?
To my surprise nobody else thought of that. Or at least I couldn't find such solutions available.
A new project was born: Cloud DynDNS!
The Python 3 source code is freely available at https://github.com/HQJaTu/cloud-dyndns, go see it, go fork it!
At this point the project is past prototyping and proof-of-concept. It's kinda alpha-level and it's running on two of my boxes with great success. It needs more tooling around deployment and installation, but all the basic parts are there:
- a command-line -utility to manage your DNS
- an expandable library to include any cloud DNS-provider, current version has Rackspace implemented
- systemd service descriptions to update the IP-address(es) at server boot, it really supports multiple network interfaces/hostnames on a same server
Any comments/feedback is appreciated. Please, file the bug reports directly to GitHub-project.
People running servers at home always get dynamic IP-addresses. Most ISPs have a no-servers -clause in their terms of contract, but they really don't enforce the rule. If you play a multiplayer on-line game and have voice chat enabled, you're kinda server already, so what's a server is very difficult to define.
Sometimes the dynamic IP-address does what dynamic things do, they change. To defeat this, people have had number of different approaches to solve the problem. For example, I've ran a DHIS-server (for details, see: https://www.dhis.org/) and appropriate client counterpart to make sure my IP-address is properly updated if/when it changes. Then there are services like Dyn.com or No-IP to do exactly the same I did with a free software.
The other day I started thinking:
I'm already using Rackspace Cloud DNS as it's free-of-charge -service. It's heavily cloud-based, robust and has amazing API to do any maintenance or updates to it. Why would I need to run a server to send obscure UDP-packets to to keep my DNS up-to-date. Why cannot I simply update the DNS-record to contain the IP-address my server has?
To my surprise nobody else thought of that. Or at least I couldn't find such solutions available.
A new project was born: Cloud DynDNS!
The Python 3 source code is freely available at https://github.com/HQJaTu/cloud-dyndns, go see it, go fork it!
At this point the project is past prototyping and proof-of-concept. It's kinda alpha-level and it's running on two of my boxes with great success. It needs more tooling around deployment and installation, but all the basic parts are there:
- a command-line -utility to manage your DNS
- an expandable library to include any cloud DNS-provider, current version has Rackspace implemented
- systemd service descriptions to update the IP-address(es) at server boot, it really supports multiple network interfaces/hostnames on a same server
Any comments/feedback is appreciated. Please, file the bug reports directly to GitHub-project.
Long live ReCaptcha v1!
Thursday, April 5. 2018
Ok. It's dead! It won't live long.
That seems to suprise few people. I know it did surprise me. 
Google has had this info in their website for couple years already:
What happens to reCAPTCHA v1?
Any calls to the v1 API will not work after March 31, 2018.
Starting in November 2017, a percentage of reCAPTCHA v1 traffic will begin to
show a notice informing users that the old API will soon be retired.
Yup. This blog showed information like this on comments:

Now that the above deadline is gone, I had to upgrade S9y ReCaptcha plugin from git-repo https://github.com/s9y/additional_plugins/tree/master/serendipity_event_recaptcha. There is no released version having that plugin yet.
Now comments display the v2-style:

To get that running, I simply got the subdirectory of plugins/serendipity_event_recaptcha
with the content from Github and went for settings:

I just filled in the new API-keys from https://www.google.com/recaptcha and done! Working! Easy as pie.
Update 5th April 2018:
Today, I found out that Spartacus has ReCaptcha v2 plugin available to S9y users. No need to go the manual installation path.
Ok. It's dead! It won't live long.
That seems to suprise few people. I know it did surprise me.
Google has had this info in their website for couple years already:
What happens to reCAPTCHA v1?
Any calls to the v1 API will not work after March 31, 2018.
Starting in November 2017, a percentage of reCAPTCHA v1 traffic will begin to
show a notice informing users that the old API will soon be retired.
Yup. This blog showed information like this on comments:
Now that the above deadline is gone, I had to upgrade S9y ReCaptcha plugin from git-repo https://github.com/s9y/additional_plugins/tree/master/serendipity_event_recaptcha. There is no released version having that plugin yet.
Now comments display the v2-style:
To get that running, I simply got the subdirectory of plugins/serendipity_event_recaptcha
with the content from Github and went for settings:
I just filled in the new API-keys from https://www.google.com/recaptcha and done! Working! Easy as pie.
Update 5th April 2018:
Today, I found out that Spartacus has ReCaptcha v2 plugin available to S9y users. No need to go the manual installation path.