DynDNS used to have a free tier, which allowed a machine behind a dynamic IP to periodically update a DNS record with its current IP. (Some home routers bundled the functionality in, too.) DynDNS’ free tier appears to have gone away.

If your home router is a regular linux box, though, you can easily use Amazon Route 53 to achieve the same thing. Route 53 isn’t free, but for unpopular domains most of the cost is in the fixed per-zone cost (and subdomains are free anyway).

So, you can dedicate a subdomain of one of your existing domains for the purpose of keeping track of your home machine, essentially free.

I wrote a little script to do this: https://github.com/mjkelly/experiments/blob/master/dns/route53-update.py. It’s still pretty rough, but it appears to work.

It is mostly self-contained, but requires libxml2 bindings for python. It takes all arguments on the command line. It could conceivably get the information other ways.

[Update, 2013-01-26: It no longer requires libxml2. I’ve also added a wrapper script to retrieve the machine’s public IP address, if --ip=auto doesn’t work (if the machine is behind NAT, for instance). It uses DynDNS’s little IP-reporter server, ironically…]

(I could have used boto to do this much more concisely, but I was interested in doing the authentication bits myself. My official justification is that I was trying to keep dependencies minimal.)

Note: If you’re running pfsense on your home router, you can use it (as of 2.1-RELEASE) to set your DNS name in Route53 as well. (It is not listed on doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Dynamic_DNS, but it is an option.)

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