Duck DNS is a free service which will point a DNS (sub domains of duckdns.org) to an IP of your choice.

In other words, you can create:

yourverycoolandawesomewebsitethatnooneknowsabout.duckdns.org

that will point to the ip of your homelab or VPS.

Why? Well, I already wrote about how to access remotely to your homelab using the Tor network. Also how it can be simplified using Tailscale and to avoid sending data to tailscale servers you could use headscale to selfhost.

So, usually you will ssh your homelab with:

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ssh user@ip-of-the-server

Where the ip-of-the-server will be something like 186.120.64.13 and if you do not have a static ip, it will change to a different one every certain time, which will be difficult to keep track. In order to avoid this hassle, it is easier to create a DNS entry and configure your home server to update automatically the ip. Here is where DuckDNS comes in play.

DuckDNS allows you to create up to 5 sites for free and provides easy to use scripts to update the ip. All you need is to register using a twitter, github or google account to obtain your token and then you can create your domain like: enchilada.duckdns.org

Now you could ssh to your homelab like:

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ssh user@enchilada.duckdns.org

Now it won't matter if your homelab changes the ip, enchilada.duckdns.org will always redirect to the correct one. This is also usefull if you want to host a website.

I would go into detail of how to install the script, but you can check the instructions and practically do copy and paste. They have instructions for windows, linux, osx and even routers running OpenWrt, dd-wrt or a synology NAS.

Final thoughts

  1. There are other dynamic DNS (DDNS) providers like noip, that will allow you up to 3 free domains and another paid options.
  2. Next topics: create a free WireGuard hub server with Oracle Cloud free tier and how to set up headscale on the free Oracle Cloud free tier and making use of DuckDNS.
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