This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Using a Hostname Instead of an IP Address
Let’s face it—dealing in “raw” IP addresses is tedious. Under the hood, your home router is itself a DHCP client of one of your ISP’s DHCP servers. This means that your router’s public IP address is likely to change at any time, which will immediately break your home-based Minecraft server.
I would much rather share the Minecraft server connection name
- timwarner.ddns.net
than share this:
- 71.228.251.55:25566
Believe it or not, it is both easy and free to make this happen for your home-based Minecraft server. To do this, we need to create an account with a Dynamic Domain Name System (DDNS) service. These are the two companies I recommend:
- No-IP (http://noip.com)
- Dyn (http://dyn.com)
Understanding DNS and DDNS
DNS is a TCP/IP network service that translates user-friendly hostnames into IP addresses. For example, if you type
http://servers.minecraftforum.net
into your browser’s address bar, the DNS server with which your computer is associated attempts to resolve the fully qualified domain name (FQDN), servers.minecraftforum.net, into the IP address of that particular web server.
The hostname part of the previous FQDN is “servers”; the domain name is “minecraftforum.net.” The specifics of DNS name resolution are far outside the scope of this book; for our purposes, all you need to know is that companies like No-IP and Dyn will map an FQDN to your router’s public IP address, and even adjust the mapping on the fly when your router’s public IP changes.
Setting Up No-IP
We’ll use No-IP in this example, but all the services work about the same.
Follow Me!: Associate Your Minecraft Server By Hostname Instead of IP Address
In this exercise, we’ll create a free No-IP account and then map our router’s public IP address to an easy-to-remember hostname.
Point your web browser to https://www.noip.com/sign-up and register a new No-IP user account. Ignore or decline any “premium” offers; these DDNS companies make their money by adding features beyond what we need. If you’re reading this while you’re away from your computer, I show you the website in Figure 4.13.
FIGURE 4.13 It’s amazing that companies such as No-IP offer their dynamic DNS services free.
Part of the signup involves choosing a domain name; as of this writing, ddns.net is the free option, so I’d suggest you choose that one. As a premium member, you get much more flexibility in your domain names.
You also can choose your own hostname; this is where I plugged in “timwarner.” After all, if my Minecraft friends know me, they know my name and will always remember the name of my Minecraft server!
- After you confirm your account via email and are all logged in, click Hosts/Redirects from the top navigation bar and then Manage Hosts from the side navigation.
- Verify that your custom FQDN matches your router’s public IP address. There’s no magic going on here, by the way. No-IP discerned your public IP address by querying your current default gateway address. Therefore, you might need to manually modify the mapping if you created your account at school but need the mapping to hit your home router.
- If you want, click Dynamic Update Client from the side navigation and download/install this software to your Minecraft server. What it does is check your router’s public IP address every five minutes, and as soon as the client detects a change, it will update your No-IP mapping. Pretty cool, eh?
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In Figure 4.14 you see that your players can now add your public Minecraft server to their client’s server list by using a DNS name instead of a clunky IP address.
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FIGURE 4.14 Your users will appreciate you for advertising your online Minecraft server with a hostname instead of an IP address.