So Fios is available in your area now and needless to say you’re psyched. When the Fios installation guys show up to your door they typically give you an Actiontec MI424WR router. They’ll stick around and help you get about as far as getting your machine connected to the internet (directly or through wireless), but thats about it. When my router was first set up I took some time to poke around in the admin utility. Sadly, Verizon has butchered the original admin utility that Actiontec provided in favor of their own fully branded utility. The problem with this is that the page load times are painfully slow, making it difficult to go in and change settings. While I was in there I took a moment to rename my router and wireless network after various mythical beasts (doesn’t everyone do this?) and set up a passkey for my wireless network. While I was in the process of doing this I stumbled upon a section for Dynamic DNS in the Advanced tab. Some modern day routers have built in functionality for synchronizing with dynamic DNS servers, and indeed the MI424WR supports this. This sort of thing can very nice if you want to remote desktop into your machine or if you want to run a production server from home (but keep in mind that port 80 is blocked by Verizon, so you’ll need to use 8080 or something else if you intend to do this). The problem, however, is that there are virtually no instructions on how to configure this, and having called Verizon to ask about it, it turns out it is only supported for those paying for business services.

After looking around on google for a while I managed to dig up the original manual for the straight from Actiontec (which seemed to have been hidden away purposely). Using this and trial and error I was able to get DDNS updating from the MI424WR. Heres what you’ll need to know:

The MI424WR only supports DDNS through dyndns.org. You’ll have to go create an account with them before doing anything else. Once you’re done make note of the dynamic domain that you created (mydomain.dyndns.org for example), your username and password. Now head over to the Advanced->Dynamic DNS section of the utility. You’ll see a screen that looks like this:

Heres what should go where:

Connection to Update – This should be set to BroadBand connection Coax

User Name – Your dyndns.org username
Password – Your dyndns.org password

Dynamic DNS System – Should be set to Dynamic DNS

Host Name: Set this to the full host name that you created when making your dyndns.org account. It should be like something.dyndns.org, or something.dnsalias.com (dyndns.org provides a number of domains you can choose, these are just two)

Now hit Apply and then Update Now and you should be ready to go. It should report back “Updated – IP updated successfully” on the same screen. Now you should have working DDNS.

Now for the remote desktop setup. Right click on My Computer and go to properties. Look for the remote tab. Once you’ve found it make sure that the radio box for “Allow users to connect remotely to this computer” is checked. Thats all you need there, now back into the router utility. Click on the “Firewall Settings” icon, then on the left side click the “Port Forwarding” section. Now click add at the bottom. On the “Protocol” drop down menu here, select “Show All Services”. Now you should be able to open the same menu and select an option for “Remote Desktop”. Select it and hit Apply. The resulting screen should look something like this.

Hit Apply one more time. Thats it, you should now have a working Remote Desktop connection thats accessible through your own personal DDNS domain. Open up Remote Desktop Connection from another computer and connect to your personal dyndns.org domain that you specified earlier.

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