I’ve just had a bit of an EEK moment. Quite a big one actually.

I use ZoneEdit.com for my dynamic DNS. When I joined it was free and you got 5 zones free. I also use an application called DirectUpdate, since it supports ZoneEdit.com out of the box, and it is a pretty flexible app.

I hadn’t changed my ZoneEdit password for a while, and since I know it expires I thought I’d better get on to it. So, I changed the password, updated the accounts in DirectUpdate, and imagine my horror when NONE of my DNS was updating.

On looking in to it, I realised that the ZoneEdit site I was using, was now legacy.zoneedit.com, and zonedit.com had a new funky looking site, and my account hadn’t been migrated, and I couldn’t log in.

I managed to solve the problem, though it took a couple of hours that I’d set aside for other things. GRRRR

I solved the problem by editing the DirectUpdate config file belonging to Zonedit.com, located in the dns folder within the DirectUpdate installation. It was called ZoneEdit.com.dud, and I had to change it to be the following, items in red are what I changed (Yes, I took a backup of it first!):

[Info]
Name=legacy.ZoneEdit.com
TargetHost=1
Version=1
CLSID={8DCDE204-FAEB-47df-A0ED-7EE7340BA7BB}
Home=http://legacy.zoneedit.com/
Signup=http://legacy.zoneedit.com/signup.html?
Features=0x0158
Fields=0x0095
[Update]
BasicAuth=1
Server=dynamic.zoneedit.com
Path=/auth/dynamic.html?
Data=host=*domain*&dnsto=*IP*&type=A*extra1*
Offline=1,&park=,1,0
[Return]
; format is “Retx=error,flags,extra,string”
; see http://legacy.zoneedit.com/doc/dynamic/ReturnCodes.txt
Size=8
Ret0=0x00000000, 0, 0,SUCCESS CODE
Ret1=0x81830068, 1, 0,ERROR CODE=”701″ TEXT=”Zone is not set up in this account.”
Ret2=0x81830077, 1, 0,ERROR CODE=”702″ TEXT=”Update failed.”
Ret3=0x8183006B, 1, 0,ERROR CODE=”703″ TEXT=”one of either parameters ‘zones’ or ‘host’ are required.”
Ret4=0x81830067, 1, 0,ERROR CODE=”704″ TEXT=”Zone must be a valid ‘dotted’ internet name.”
Ret5=0x81830067, 1, 0,ERROR CODE=”705″ TEXT=”Zone cannot be empty”
Ret6=0x01830066, 0, 0,ERROR CODE=”707″ TEXT=”Duplicate updates for the same host/ip, adjust client settings”
Ret7=0x8183006F, 2, 300,ERROR CODE=”707″ TEXT=”Too frequent updates for the same host, adjust client settings”

I’ve also emailed ZoneEdit support, using the email address on the new site, asking for an account migration. Hopefully once that’s done, everything will be straight again and I can go back to using the unmodified ZoneEdit.com.dud file.

Furthermore, there seems to be a password length limit, mine was 12 characters and was getting truncated so updates weren’t working, though I’m not sure if this is a Zoneedit issue, or a Direct Update issue. I settled on a shorter password, and updated it where necessary, and all seems to be back to normal.

As a backup plan I now also send an email to my Hotmail and Gmail accounts, so that if the IP address changes, but Zoneedit doesn’t update for some reason, I will at least be able to go and manually update the DNS.

Very annoying indeed!!!