One for Mark: Running a Server

[Diasi]

I live on a Private Deed community where all the open spaces are owned the residents in the form of a Ltd Company & in May I was asked to stand as a Director which I agreed to do.

My main role is looking after the technology side of the operation & in addition to updating the record keeping system I'm considering discontinuing SharePoint & putting everything onto one of my NAS drives
which I'd then make available to the other Directors

BT won't issue a static IP address for a private line but as the company is not a business I won't pay for a business line.

I'm looking at using a third party DDNS provider.

What are your views & how difficult a process is it?

[klondike]

Ideally you want one of your always on devices to keep the DDNS server updated and the obvious choice is your router but a lot of ISP provided routers are feature poor and can't do it. I'd suggest that your first port of call should be to check yours. Failing that I'd guess that most NAS devices will act as a DDNS client.

https://www.noip.com is widely supported by most routers or NAS devices and they themselves may offer their own DDNS. Both my Asus router and Synology NAS do. 

No-ip free can be a pita in that you get regular emails asking you to confirm it is still in use. I think dyndns stopped offering free a while back.

Having any ports open on your home network is a security risk. Check to see if your NAS offers remote access via their servers. If it does you won't need DDNS anyway as the access would be through their website.

[Diasi]

Thanks Mark.

Funnily enough I'd looked at No IP just before I posted so I'm pleased you've mentioned them.

At some later stage when I've got the admin side sorted I'm fairly sure I'll switch to it.

When I took up my role I found that we run on 365 with it's SharePoint / Outlook / OneDrive & Azure ID or Microsoft Entra ID as it's now called.