What does DNS stand for?
 
If you have used the Internet for a while, you surely know a lot of names like "www.google.it", "www.imdb.com", "www.kernel.org" and so on. They are the names of your preferred websites and you can remember them easily. Computers, though, find numbers really more useful than names, so computers don't use domain names, but IP (Internet Protocol) numbers.
You may have already guessed it: if you want to type "www.google.com" instead of "62.98.102.43" somebody has to do a translation!

Domain Name Servers are the things which make these translations transparently for you. :-)

What is hDynu?
 
In order to have your own domain name, you have to have a static IP address, so that you can register the name to the IP.
This is good for people who have a permanent connection where their IP is known and doesn't change, but is not suitable to people who have a dynamic connection (a dial-up most of the times, but even some DSL have this "feature").
When somebody with a dynamic IP address wants to put online his own website, an ftp server, a game server or anything else which will offer services to other people, he has to tell his friends "Yes, go to 75.12.31.128" which is not very pleasant... because should his line drop, as soon as he reconnects he has to tell his friends a new address since it changed! :-(
 
To help these situations, some sites offer you to register (either free or paying something) a name on their website (example: "hrk.dynu.net") and then give you a way to easily update your IP everytime it changes.
We're finally getting there: hDynu is nothing else than a Linux client to easily update www.Dynu.com's dynamic DNS table.
 
Why did I make it? www.Dynu.com already has three clients for Linux (an executable, a perl script, a shell script), but I don't like them. They don't do what I need, so I have made something which suits my needs and maybe your needs too. :-)

Features
 
The current release of hDynu has the following features:

1. Works really fine.
2. Can update more than one domain at a time.
3. Can be executed once or can be launched to stay in background and periodically update a list of domains.
4. Can be configured either by command line parameters or by a configuration file (hdynu.cfg)
5. Can be executed by anu user who has access to the connection, not requiring root privileges.
6. Can be configured to automatic detect the IP address for the update.
7. Has a pleasant looking output on the screen, outputting only what's really important.

What's better, it's that if you find it lacking something, it can be added.
The current release of hDynu lacks the following things:

1. a man page. Any volunteer?
2. a function to replace sscanf() which causes weird things upon incorrect input. On incorrect input, the program doesn't do anything harmful, but I don't like sscanf() to ruin my good code! ;-) *perfectionist*

Downloads
 
You can download both the source and a pre-compiled binary (i386, gcc 2.95.4, debian Woody) at the project's homepage, section downloads.
 
Current version is: 1.0 (Feb, 14th 2003)
 
The code is released under the terms of the GNU Public License.

Notes
 
This project doesn't need a big homepage or a community, but if you want to make a better homepage (I'm too tired to make one...) or help me making a better project or help me with feature requests or bug notices, packages for distributions... I'll be happy. :-)

Contacts
 
If you want to contribute to the project, if you want to comment on it, if you need anything, you can use the following informations:

• email: Hrk, project administrator and main developer.
• forum: Developers (if you have suggestions related to the code)
• forum: Help (if something went wrong and you need some help)
• forum: Open discussion (everything else or the place for idle chat...)

Links
 
www.Dynu.com, free DNS services and more.
Project's homepage on SourceForge.net