Instead of setting up boring proxy or similar, I had paid for Eero’s DDNS service in order to access my self-hosted services from outside my LAN. How do I point the domain I’ve purchase from takingnames.ioto the .eero.online that Eero provides me with? The below is my understanding of how to point the “root” domain using the @ symbol (that’s how Namecheap does it) to the subdomain that Eero gives me (I’ve obviously not included it) and given it a 5-minute TTL which is Namecheap’s default.
I’ve only used Namecheap before, and the documentation on Eero’s side of this links to a GoDaddy article that doesn’t seem to be relevant, because it mentions a “forwarding” section of their interface that takingnames.io doesn’t have. Apologies in advance if this is an amateur question, but I feel that this piece is simply missing from my understanding of DNS.
Good question. Unfortunately the situation is a bit tricky. The main reason TakingNames.io exists is because I don’t think you should have to worry about any of this. But it’s still the reality today.
There are a few things at play here. What you’re attempting may work, but it’s technically not supported by DNS. See this article for background information.
Probably the most reliable solution for you right now would be to use a free Cloudflare account and use them for your DNS. Basically you would just paste the nameservers they give you into the TakingNames.io page. As discussed in the article, Cloudflare can do “CNAME flattening” which should allow it to work. The article mentions other providers and their solutions as well.
Another thing you might try is using a subdomain instead of the root (@) for the CNAME. For example “services.yourdomain.com”. If that doesn’t work then there’s a bug in TakingNames.io. This is usually less desirable for public-facing content like websites but if you’re just running services for yourself maybe you don’t mind.
Note that if you’re wanting to host services from home without using something like boringproxy, you’ll also likely need to set up port forwarding with eero.
Thank you for the detailed response, @anders! As you said near the end, I was planning to have to manually enter the ports forwarded in the Eero app; that’s not a big deal. However, if ALIAS records are not available for takingnames.io then I think that I will request a refund for the domain that I purchased if that is possible. This is all over my head and, as you said, Taking Names was built for a different purpose than what I am in the position to achieve.
Thank you for your visionary work on this, and I hope to be able to successfully revisit it sometime soon.
No worries. Happy to do a refund if you want to go that direction.
That said, I just implemented ANAME (ALIAS) records for TakingNames.io. If you want to give that a try first I’d appreciate it.
If not, just let me know if you want the refund. We can also look into transferring the domain to another registrar that has the features you need. I’ll cover the cost of the transfer.
