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How to access Merlin projects from dynamic-IP driven locations

John Kranz on 9. March 2010

If you are publishing Merlin projects from a computer that has a dynamically generated IP address, this can cause problems for your users already having received the project URLs and use in the meanwhile obsolete IPs to access the projects.  This situation easily occurs, as the IP address of your router changes upon re-connecting to your internet provider.

In this case the actual project URLs will fall out of sync with the URL and IP address that Merlin has originally published. Fortunately, there is a solution readily at hand thanks to the free service provided by DynDNS.org that allows you to create a static host name that can be used instead.

Creating a DynDNS account and a host service is free of charge. This service can convert the dynamically generated and ever-changing IP address that your router obtains from your ISP to a static host name and automatically route to your location. This way you will have a reliable URL that can be used for accessing Merlin projects from a web browser which otherwise would not be possible.

To do so, please proceed as follows:

1. Call in your web browser www.dyndns.org and click onto ‘Create Account’



2. You will be asked to enter information for creating your account by DynDNS and will receive an email on the registered address. To activate your account you need to click  a confirmation URL contained in the email.
3. Log-in once again into DynDNS, navigate to ‘Account’ and ‘Add Host Services’



4. Type a host name and select the desired domain. Supposedly you would like to create “myproject” as the domain prefix name for the domain “homeunix.org”, you simply type  myproject as a host name and select homeunix.org out of the domain pop up. This would result in an address like http://myproject.homeunix.org.
5. Enter in the IP Address field the current IP Address of your router or click onto ‘Your current location’s IP address’
   
   Some routers may not support this configuration option, but DynDNS.org provides free software for the Mac which helps you map your dynamically IP address to this newly created host of your account.
6. Press ‘Add To Cart’ and proceed as DynDNS advises.

Once you have identified your static host name as provided by DynDNS.org, you can now use it for all Merlin projects you will be publishing with the Web Module. This means you can manually alter the URL so that it uses the static host name before providing it to users for web access.
For example, let’s assume that Merlin has generated the following URL for your published project: http://123.456.789.012:7080/wa/default?title=Client-Website

You can swap out the IP address 123.456.789.012 with the complete domain name myproject.homeunix.org. The resulting URL can now get propagated and used to access your Merlin project through a web browser:

http://myproject.homeunix.org:7080/wa/default?title=Client-Website

Updated:

by Vicky Stamatopoulou

Revised text and screenshots

Tags: DynDNS, Merlin 101, Merlin Web