Originally Posted by
JimR
I have a home security alarm system. Up until now it was monitored by a security company. I decided that I was paying a monthly fee for something that I could do myself much cheaper. All they would do in the event of an alarm was to call me to say that there had been an alarm. Maybe eventually they would call the police, but I think the whole service was kind of useless.
So, I bought a new central alarm unit with cell 'phone dial out capability, plus a separate security camera system. The security camera can be monitored using the internet although it records automatically without any intervention. I realize the internet can be very easily disconnected by any thieves, but the recording unit is hidden.
Here's the question; in order to see what's going on while I'm away from the house I plan to connect to the security camera system (DVR) remotely via smartphone. The DVR is connected to one of my router ports. Since I do not have a fixed home IP address I need to use a third party dynamic DNS service. Has anybody had any experience with these companies? I'm kind of concerned that it's like giving an open invitation for an uninvited guest to find a way into my computer.
2 things:
1) Using a DDNS service such as no-ip.com or dyndns is not in itself inherently unsafe (if you really want to be frightened, your router is likely being scanned once every 30 seconds or so by script kiddies whether or not you're in DNS).
2) Opening router ports to the internet is the dangerous thing. For this, make sure you research the kit you're going to expose to the internet and also the ports you're opening, so that you know you're not exposing things that are already compromised or compromisable to the internet. If possible, also choose a random port number above 1024 so that you can be less susceptible to the automated port scanning efforts of the script kiddies mentioned in #1 above.