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Oracle Dyn DNS Services Shutting Down in 2020
143 points by pierlu on June 25, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 82 comments
From an email to old customers of DYN services: "Oracle is announcing the end-of-life for the free Standard DNS service in favor of the enhanced, paid subscription version on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. On May 31, 2020, the “EOL Date”, the Standard DNS will be retired and will no longer be available."

The following capabilities are not currently supported in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure DNS:

    Webhop (HTTP redirect)
    Dynamic DNS
    Zone transfer to external nameservers
    DNSSEC
The migration to the new services is apparently a copy&paste DNS zone export to the new cloud.

https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/dyn/technologies/migrate-your-services/




As a lesson to anyone else hoping to do a shutdown with a migration to a different service with your company.

If you are going to treat me the same as any new subscriber, where I have to re-signup, re-add my payment method, export my settings and then import them again, you're asking me to buy all over again.

If you ask me to buy, then I get will reevaluate the relationship, and if it's just as easy to migrate to another supplier I will move.

Migrating internally should have been "push this button to accept the new terms and pricing, you don't even need to talk with your registrar."

I've been a Dyn customer for over a decade, and now I'm moving because it's just as easy to move as it is to stay, and I do not want to have to type in "oracle.com" to manage my service.


A few years ago, we needed to move 4 VMs from one host in a DC nearby to on-prem. They were in their own little IP subnet, and they ran this crappy software called CoPath from Cerner. The app, being written in PowerBuilder, it was a delicate app, and I called up Cerner to ask the best way to move these VMs since we'd need to change the IP address space they occupied. Cerner said they had no idea what might happen, it might work, or everything might break. The safest path was to reinstall in new VMs and move the data. It would be $25,000 to do that. I laughed, said I can get a new LIS system for taht including data import. They said they'd take that feedback to the quote team, never got another response.

I changed LIS systems, saved money.


Some software I used to work on, had this sort of issue. Customers would call up and say "how do I change the machine's IP address" and Support would reply "you can't, you have to reinstall".

What was really going on: there were a whole bunch of config files, into several of which the installer embedded whatever was the machine IP at install time. Support didn't know exactly how many files there were. Engineering was asked to document them all but for whatever reason were dragging their feet on doing it. My attitude was – why can't we just do a search&replace? Response I got – we can't trust customers/Support to do that without making a mess of it.

Eventually, engineering wrote and shipped a "change machine IP tool" which knew about exactly which config files contained the machine IP. Finally, we had a supported procedure for changing the IP address of the server.


I work for a Dyn Enterprise DNS customer, so I read the Enterprise FAQ which says:

> If you’re a Dyn Managed DNS customer and minimal downtime is acceptable, follow the instructions above to migrate your services to OCI.

> If you’re a Dyn Managed DNS customer and downtime is not acceptable, please check back with us in August when we are planning on having a migration tool available to help avoid downtime.

We happen to be wrapping up a migration to a self-hosted solution, but we chose Dyn because we didn't find "minimal" downtime to be something generally acceptable. [edited this sentence for clarity]

For personal use, it's worth checking out free DNS service from Hurricane Electric, https://dns.he.net/ it includes Dynamic DNS, and Hurricane Electric is probably not going anywhere. I'm not affiliated, but I use their secondaries for my personal domains.


I just reevaluated. I moved to another supplier (hello cloudflare). I suspect I have been a customer for more than 15 years. Possibly even longer. Way longer. 2 decades? I was a VIP member too - whatever "cred" that holds. Account now closed.


I've been using them since at least 2002 --- but that was a service migration at their end, so the actual time would be longer than that.

I hear gandi.net's DNS is good.


Don't forget the five minute wait to update your cookie preferences before you can interact with their website. That's a nice usability touch.


As a person that utterly detests oracle's db software licensing model, every time I see a sales pitch from Oracle I mentally translate it as "Larry Ellison needs a bigger yacht".


He owns an entire Hawaiian island. We're past the bigger yacht stage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanai


I bet you could exceed $300m on a yacht if you went to the top tier yacht builders with a blank check and said "build me something bigger than the largest yacht owned by the wealthiest saudi royal"


That's pretty much exactly how the transition is for me:

Dear Customer,

Since Oracle acquired Dyn in 2016 and subsequently acquired Zenedge. The engineering teams have been working diligently to integrate Dyn’s products and network into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. A majority of Dyn products have now been integrated and upgraded on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Accordingly, DynDNS Pro/Remote Access is decoupling from the Dyn brand and business unit this summer, and will remain a business unit within Oracle.

Your organization has the right to access and use DynDNS Pro/Remote Access. This product will continue to be available from Oracle without any disruption of service and no action is required on your part at this time.


I have been a donating member of the now defunct everydns.net, acquired by DYN in the 2010, sadly then acquired by Oracle in 2016 for some strange reasons, probably because DB experts are always fascinated by DNS experts. Somehow I am then a VIP user of dyn/Oracle, and I have received two emails. One is the aforementioned, containing inflated marketing words for 'Action required please migrate to the best cloud (i.e. Oracle)', the other is 'don't worry, for you VIPs, DYN will remain a separate business unit. No action is required on your part at this time'. AT THIS TIME.

I think I will install for my personal domains a good chrooted bind (or powerdns) on a couple of public facing linux servers. AT THIS TIME sounds too intimidating to me.


I somehow got both messages - I need to migrate to Oracle's new platform and also "no action is required". I expect the DynDNS hostnames I had constituted part of the free service despite needing a Pro account to create them.


Yeah, I got the same message. As of this moment, I have no reason to change, since it is a seamless transition with no appreciable changes to my service.


Minor point: You'd actually be typing "oraclecloud.com", e.g. https://console.us-ashburn-1.oraclecloud.com

That's a lot better, right? grin ;)


This isn't surprising, but still upsetting.

First as noted, no Dynamic DNS or DNSSEC?? REALLY?? Come on.

Second as also noted, the migration is manually! You have to download a zone record and upload it, and that's after manually creating your account.

I'll be switching to Cloudflare. Been considering it for a while, but now it makes sense.


No dynamic DNS? This is literally the name of the company they bought.

And the migration is just a sign up for a new service after exporting my zone config? They really don't care about losing customers it would seem. Easy enough, my router supports domains.google.com for ddns and my domain registration is already there, it's time for DNS to follow it.


In general, as a user, if a product you are using gets acquired it's a good reason to move away from it ASAP. More often than not acquirers kill products and keep the talent.


And sometimes, they don't even keep the talent: https://www.unionleader.com/news/business/workers-at-oracle-...


They didn't buy it in order to offer dynamic dns.


I’d imagine the type of customer using Dynamic DNS is not the type of customer Oracle wants.


My thoughts exactly. Oracle's loss is Cloudflare's gain...


> Second as also noted, the migration is manually! You have to download a zone record and upload it, and that's after manually creating your account.

It is not manual, you don't have to do anything... other than pay consultants to do the migration for you, of course.


Are you surprised that the migration is manual? This is Oracle we're talking about, not some software services company that would have resources on-hand to write some internal scripts to take care of that for their customers...

/s


I was a Dyn customer since the late 90s (I think...). In the early(ish) days they offered a lifetime DNS service for something like $30, so I jumped on the opportunity. I don't think there was much else around at the time...

All things considered, I managed to get a pretty good deal out of it. Can't really complain, can I?

Anyone knows a good alternative with simple DDNS updaters?


Lots of people use our DNS and update via the API to make dynamic DNS. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/36002052451...


I wonder if you would want to add a link to that page about setting up Cloudflare dynamic DNS on a Synology NAS? That's my use case, and I found a script[1] and a page[2] where people were having some success using it.

[1] https://github.com/joshuaavalon/SynologyCloudflareDDNS [2] https://luvis.se/tipstricks/set-up-dynamic-dns-with-cloudfla...


Me too :) https://github.com/kissgyorgy/cloudflare-dyndns


I recently moved a MUD I host from cloud services to a little System76 box in my laundry room. I use dnsimple.com for my domains and they have an API, so I just added a little task to my MUD server to periodically check my ip address via https://api.ipify.org/ and then check what I have for my A record in dnsimple's API, if it differs I update it.


In addition to what @jgrahamc said, another good option for some services is to use a Cloudflare Argo Tunnel. Spin it up on your local machine, and web traffic will be routed to it without having to open your firewall, DMZ, etc. It also has a free tier now: https://blog.cloudflare.com/a-free-argo-tunnel-for-your-next...


I found duckdns a while ago, I use it to tinker with ephemeral / non-production stuff.


At the time it was specifically "dyndns.org", because there was a separate "dyndns.com" company that they eventually bought out, IIRC.

> All things considered, I managed to get a pretty good deal out of it.

Was a good run for sure.


> Anyone knows a good alternative with simple DDNS updaters?

Personally I just use Amazon's Route 53 and a ~150 line shell script wrapping awscli[1] to update the records. It's not ddclient but it gets the job done. Cost averages about $1.51/mo. for the DNS service and annual domain renewal—that's for a $12/yr. .info domain; other TLDs will vary. The DNS service pricing depends on the traffic, but at only $0.01 per 25,000 queries it's probably not a significant factor for most of the sites that would benefit from dynamic DNS.

[1] http://willwarren.com/2014/07/03/roll-dynamic-dns-service-us...


If you paid the $30, you might be considered to be on the Pro plan. I (like others in this thread) received an email stating that Pro service will continue uninterrupted, and no action is required on my part.


I like and use nsupdate.info for years. Also: It's free software.


I'm surprised people haven't mentioned

https://https://www.duckdns.org/


I've used dns.he.net recently. Seems to work, and you can't argue with the price.


I'm currently using dynv6. Despite the name they also support A records. :-)

Nothing overly fancy, useable via simple curl calls. I'm just using it to reach my home server, so if you want more advanced features ymmv.


I'm a happy user of Afraid's FreeDNS: https://freedns.afraid.org

Edit: I'm not affiliatted with the service, I just really like it.


Joshua is a really friendly and generous one to run it for all these years. I'd trust this than some corporate who didn't bother to migrate customers.


What a throwback. It's great to see that their service is still trucking along.


Yes! I have used it for years, it Just Works.


Yet again, proving that Oracle is the computing industry's graveyard.


I call Oracle the Black Thumb. Everything they touch, aside from their flagship database, dies. Java. Sun. BerkleyDB. Mysql. Taleo. Larry Ellison might be the 4th horseman - he dresses the part.


I'm not a fan of Oracle by any measure, but what you are stating just is not true.

MySql is going strong and is very actively developed. (even if Oracle is predictably trying to have more features in the Enterprise Edition). I'd still always choose Postgres, but that's besides the point.

Java has undergone very positive modernization and change over the last couple of years, following a long period of stagnation, and is the opposite of dying. (Also here, one has to warn though that Oracle is probably trying to abandon the JVM in the long term and move over to GraalVM for monetization).


Mysql is dead, long live mariadb


Ditto. Amazon’s Aurora is nice also.


On top of that, Oracle still makes hardware. I don't think they can be blamed for stagnating interest in that area.


You don't need no dynamic DNS service. Cloudflare is free for this with way more cool features. Here is a little command line script for the Cloudflare REST API which you can use to update A records for domains at Cloudflare: https://github.com/kissgyorgy/cloudflare-dyndns


Digitalocean has a free dns service plus an api. All you need is a cron based api call and you have dynamic dns.


I did not know this. Source/docs?


Here's a good place to start: https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/networking/dns/overview/

As a note: you'll have to add a valid payment method on DigitalOcean to activate your account, but once you're in it's free to use all the DNS features, and you can automate via the API, docs here: https://developers.digitalocean.com/documentation/v2/#domain...


That doesn't give me good vibes. They're surely going to attempt to monetize it at some point. What's the benefit for digitalocean to providing a 'free' service?


Note that I'm a Developer Advocate at DigitalOcean.

AFAIK, there is no plans to move to paid service. It makes sense to make DNS management easier for developers if you have your applications or websites running on our droplets.


I have a bash script that runs as a cron to get my current external IP address every ~5 minutes. If it has changed, it updates AWS Route53 with the new IP. Route53 costs $1/mo (for a zone = domain) and DNS lookups are basically free.


I didn't renew my Dyn subscrition a few months ago, considering they had increased their pricing model and offered nothing new. And being owned by "evil" Oracle didn't help.

Today it's relatively easy to build a self-hosted dynamic DNS equivalent, e.g. https://github.com/dprandzioch/docker-ddns so I'm in the process of solving the issue like this.


isn't the point of dynamic DNS that it's not self-hosted? It should be on a static IP somewhere outside the network/IP you want to monitor.

I run a server at home and I can always just go update my DNS records to some new IP but the catch is I cannot ssh home without knowing the new IP address, hence the point of a dynamic DNS service.

If you host that in the same network, what's the point? You lose access to it too.


From the README of the linked repository:

> All you need is a cheap VPS, a domain and access to it's nameserver.

I personally find it a bit misleading to classify this as being "self-hosted", seeing as how it's effectively the same as every other dynamic DNS service.


This is very much Oracle. Killing competition by just buying good tech and closing it down.


I'm not an Oracle fan, but what Oracle product did DynDNS compete with? It seems more likely that they bought the people/tech for the Oracle cloud effort and didn't care at all about DynDNS business, which seemed like pretty small potatoes by Oracle standards.


>This is very much Oracle

This is very much large companies.


You can always tell when they're completely done digesting an acquisition, because the digestive process always ends with a belch like this.


True. But Oracle is exceptionally good at it.


It was DynDNS's business too, EasyDNS and EveryDNS were both great services with excellent free options til DynDNS bought them out and shut them down.


Pro services are NOT shutting down though, right? My e-mail says this:

Dear Customer,

Since Oracle acquired Dyn in 2016 and subsequently acquired Zenedge. The engineering teams have been working diligently to integrate Dyn’s products and network into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. A majority of Dyn products have now been integrated and upgraded on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Accordingly, DynDNS Pro/Remote Access is decoupling from the Dyn brand and business unit this summer, and will remain a business unit within Oracle.

Your organization has the right to access and use DynDNS Pro/Remote Access. This product will continue to be available from Oracle without any disruption of service and no action is required on your part at this time.


They are also completely ending support for DNS in mainland China:

>Please note, however, that the China Network is being retired. On May 31, 2020, the “EOL Date”, the China Network will no longer be available, and you will need to find another provider.


I got this email and immediately moved my vanity domain to Amazon Route 53.


I'm confused. What happens to DynDns accounts that have been paid-up beyond 2020 or folks that bought the "lifetime" subscription?


I have a lifetime subscription, and received the same email saying service is ending.


The product's lifetime, not yours ;).


Thanks very much for posting this! I also am a Dyn customer, and I discovered that Apple Mail moved the notification into Junk.


Based on what? Im asking because with bad thinking, this could be one of the greatest marketing moves.


The only reason I was with Dyn is because they acquired EveryDNS. The cycle of big fish eating the little fish continues.


I don't need dynamic DNS but was thinking about moving domains at new job to dyn:-I used it at 'developer' and 'pro' levels in the past. I liked the analytics, and the central management.

I am now in the market for something else. What are the options for small enterprise dns? Cloudflare? Route53? What else


Perfect opportunity for existing customers to migrate to a different service.


I'm confused. Are you sure that this affects the dynamic DNS? The free version went away years ago, but the "pro" version is still listed as available for sale on the dyn.com web site.


I used to use https://dns-api.com .You do stuff with git and it's basically Route53 plus it's cheap (1£ per domain)


As a pre-Oracle customer of DynDNS because they had some obscure TLDs at good prices - geez. Oracle took them over, tripled the prices for these TDLs, and then torn DynDNS into pieces. Brutal.


you should mention that this is just for people on the FREE plan. If you are a paying customer (the PRO version), you are NOT affected.


That's not true. All plans are affected, and once you "upgrade" to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you're moved to a Pay As You Go plan

>Now that this integration work is complete, Oracle is announcing the end-of-life of the DNS service in favor of our upgraded version on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Platform. On May 31, 2020, the “EOL Date”, the DNS will be retired and will no longer be available. The upgrade to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will require some actions on your part and must be completed on or before the EOL Date.

>You can also upgrade when your current Oracle Dyn or Zenedge contract expires on [contact-end-date]. If you chose to not upgrade by the time your contract renews, your right to access and use the service will be moved to a month to month subscription governed by your current agreement until May 31, 2020. If you do not have auto-renew enabled, your service will end based on your agreement.


Correct. I've been paying $12/month for the Managed DNS service.


...or ZeroTier :)




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