After switching to FiOS, it was time to move my domain, hurst-ri.us, from a solid provider in dotEarth to a new location with DynDNS. The reason for the move is because I would no longer be able to co-locate with my brother’s store, rah-cocos.com, as he prepares to close his store/warehouse — along with the FiOS for business line and the Internet static IP address. But not to worry, because the FiOS router allows you to DMZ an internal device and includes a native client to send along any dynamic IP address update to a dynamic DNS provider, such as DynDNS.

I started by testing the router’s capabilities by procuring a free host on one of DynDNS’s 88 domains: hurst.homelinux.net. And, it’s always nice to have an extra hostname, for separation of virtual services from each other, such as email and web addresses. That worked out very quickly and easily.

Next, I tested remote access to services I wanted to provide: email, ftp, ssh, imaps, web, and webdav.  I created a new virtual guest running Fedora 12 on my workstation and rewrote the iptable rules to forward the DMZ ports to it.  Again, no issues, because there is no  ISP port-blocking enforced.  Sending outbound mail had gotten a little tricky, because a lot of competing ISPs will block email from residential email servers — even if they have legitimate domains like myself — because it is sent unauthenticated (and probably unsolicited) by Verizon’s network and not their servers.

I discovered I can easily remedy that situation with one-line added in sendmail’s access file:

AuthInfo:outgoing.verizon.net "U:myaccount" "I:myaccount" "P:mypassword" "M:LOGIN PLAIN"

After some testing, this solution turned out to be very painless to implement.

The DNS transfer is very slow, but that is a result of registrar compliance.  It generally takes 5-7 days, with my experience with that being no different.  During the transition, I ran my own Internet DNS service for both of our domains, so I had to keep mine active until it switched over to DynDNS servers.  Once it did, I could safely remove my DNS service from answering queries to hurst-ri.us.  The only restriction imposed by this process is that I cannot do another domain transfer for another 60-days, which should not present any problem for my vanity use of it.