Talkin' DNS & IPs.... Chicken Geekin'...
Ok - so simply put, an
IP address is to the virtual world as your house address is to the physical world. If I want to talk to you I go to your address, and knock on the door and say hi and you answer or you don't. That same concept happens in the world of Internet. An IP address is assigned to your modem by your Internet provider. Unless you are a business, your Internet provider likely changes that IP address often. That's called a dynamic IP. That's what you have. What you need, is a
static IP -- one that doesn't change. Are your eyes glazed yet?
DNS means your provider (domain name server or service). Think of that as the phone book. I like to think of it as the Internet Traffic cops giving directions. You ask for my website and the DNS server tells you where to find it (by IP address - everything, including your phone is given an IP address).
Now for the FUN part....
DDNS --- google it. I don't have a cutesy analogy for this one. You need that dynamic IP address to be static (not changing, always the same). DDNS is the solution to that. I use dyndns.org and have for years. There are several services available to you. You set up a free account. And you answer all the questions. There should be a how to section for you to follow. Not complicated at all. The service will provide you with a word address instead of a number address. For example, instead of 172.347.23.6 you will have an address of say.... in my case, blessing.dyndns.org. That's not exactly it on purpose. Principal is the same. When you set this account up, it constantly monitors your dynamic IP address and changes the address for you in the background every time your provider changes that number address. So in essence you now have a static address - just not numbers. Sorta like Mrs. Smith is the same as Mary Smith. Yet, with some men, Mrs. Smith might actually change from year to year. Still Mrs. Smith.... maybe not Mary... now Jane. Now if I want to see my cameras off site (off my own network), I use that dydnds.org address to find my camera.
One more step to this section to understand -
ports. Everyone who comes to my house knocks on my front door. That's the main port - it is port 80 --- most all Internet travels through port 80. You request a webpage and it comes on your computer via port 80. Think of my house as an apartment house. Each apartment is a port. With one main port - 80. (If you are a hacker you will hit port 80 hard. And they do.) But if you want my tenant, you might knock on my back door -- and that might be port 4037. So what we are going to do is to assign each of your cameras their own port number. So when the Internet request comes in for my Camera1 -- and an Internet request comes in for my Camera2 --- the request and the answer to that request will come through it's own port. Can you spell S E C U R I T Y? That we need to do. We don't want these cameras answering to port 80.
I will tie all of this together IF you still want to go further. This is the techy stuff. The chickens don't care. The backyard chicken monitors might care. So tell me if I should continue. I hate to bore people and certainly this can be boring. But if you want live web cams that you can see from anywhere.... just sayin'... (this is so boring to even me that I can't re-read it blah
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