Hi everyone, I know it’s possible to make a CNAME record on our domain that points to the Find My Peplink address for a device, but we offer the devices as part of a monthly managed service to our customers. So instead of providing the customer with the name.mypep.link address, if I was to create a CNAME on our custom domain hosted by Route 53, such as customername.ourdomain.com and provide them that, I know that’s of course possible but what if they then want to make their own CNAME record on their domain, such as remote.theirdomain.com which points to customername.ourdomain.com? Would there be any potential problems in doing it this way?
I’m mainly concerned about it slowing down, as right now if WAN1 is up and the mypep.link resolves to that, and I disconnect it, it takes 20-30 seconds on average (but sometimes up to 2 minutes) before that mypep.link address resolves to the secondary WAN connection. Same with when the WAN1 is restored, it’s on average 20-30 seconds to update. If I did it as the above, a CNAME on our domain pointing to the mypep.link and then the customer has a CNAME on their domain pointing to ours, should it update just as quickly or anything I should be aware of in that case?
This will update whatever service you want to use with the current IP address of the circuit so that you can remotely access the device (assuming it’s a public IP address). Additionally if you have public static IPs anyway on the WAN side, just use an A record on your DNS instead of a CNAME.
Of course… if you only have private IPs (RFC1918) or NAT’d IPs, DNS can still work… just the normal rules are followed.
Its a valid concern. I have just tried this on two domain names from two different providers. On 123-reg.co.uk you can’t set a TTL when you create a CNAME on the other you can (set it to 1min) but when I tested it both had a TTL set of 4hours for the CNAME record.
The default TTL on mypep.link domain is 60secs. If you can get a DNS server to set a TTL of 60secs on a CNAME then it should work pretty well. As it stands now, if the WAN IP changes, a CNAME pointed at the mypep.link domain will take 4 hours to reflect the change.
An alternative approach would be to roll your own DNS server or redirect service I suppose.
Guess it depends if you want to hide the mypep.link dns name or if you are just adding a new domain for the sake of convenience. If the latter - there are loads of open source url shorteners / redirectors you could use.
Hello @liammonroe,
We run an Enterprise setup with Oracle (DYN was brought out by Oracle some time ago now).
Having an Enterprise setup allows us to host and manage multiple domains plus subdomains with the advantage of having dynamic domains where required. Where we have Peplink routers acting as “Authoritative DNS” servers, they are still linked back to the Enterprise managed domains.
Here are some of the articles we reference: @Erik_deBie has compiled a guide for setting up DDNS with Peplink/Pepwave equipment that you may find useful
@Alan has compiled a guide for setting up inbound load balancing; this can be done (and we’ve made it work with only Oracle (DYN)) using DDNS through all IPs must be Public-Facing on the WANs as any carrier NATs will prevent this from working).
