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Last in my small series about running your own Dynamic DNS service: how to support clients which can't use the "nsupdate" tool directly.

For a number of reasons it is nice to know your own IP-address. If you are behind a firewall or a NAT system, you usually only have a private IP-address and "someone else" on the internet needs to tell you your official IP-address.

Given what usually happens with free services - they are closed once in a while - and with freemium services - they change the business modell - I decided to run my own service. After all, it's not that complicated, and it integrates well into my own Dynamic DNS service.

Dyn, the company behind the widely known dynamic DNS service DynDNS, will shut down it's free service effectively May 7th, 2014. Of course there are plenty of other free or freemium services out there, but history will repeat itself and these services will vanish over time, or change their business modell.

A while ago I spent an afternoon to implement my own dynamic DNS service.

Whenever you Copy&Paste (or Cut&Paste) something into or from a VMware instance, the software first copies the files into a temporary directory and later on sends the copy/move job to Windows. Since the Windows task is asynchronous, VMware has no chance to find out when this actually finishes - so it is supposed to clean up this temporary directory at boot time.

However, waiting for the next reboot can clog up quite some disk space (when I develop something I often have to copy many files around between several virtual machines and the desktop) - despite that Windows still likes to BSoD on me from time to time. And sometimes VMware does not get the cleanup right at reboot and the files are still there.

So I wrote myself a little Cygwin shell script (you should really consider installing Cygwin when you have to work on Windows) and the execution of this script is scheduled every night by the Windows Scheduler.