I'm running some test services on a box that has a dynamic IP address.

If (for example) I own the address www.abc.com and want to try mapping test services on the dynamic box to test.abc.com, can anyone suggest a nice way to update the dns records at www.abc.com to map test.abc.com to my IP.

I already have a utility that monitors my IP address (running under Windows) and it has the ability to run a script when it detects an IP address change. I would like some ideas of a utility I can find (or program if someone can give me the idiots guide to submitting DNS changes) that will contact the external DNS server for www.abc.com and ask it to add/modify the entry for test.abc.com?

Ultimately I will be moving to static IP but during the testing phase this would make a lovely addition.

Thanks all
bb
The DNS Ignorant One

This domain isn't really my strong suit, but I would assume that more information is needed:

1. Is the dns server under your control?
-> yes read the manpage, possibly write a small webservice that runs the update command. Also make sure to put the TTL of the dns records rather low. Even then some ISP's will cache the results and only update ones every 24hours. (damn you _my isp_)

-> no check how you normally update the ip, if you can't automate that, contact tech support.


2. Is a dyndns service a possibility? There are companies out there that offer this kind of service, and tools to update it to their service.
The ones that spring to mind are no-ip.com and dyndns.com

Mine either I have the ability (via cpanel at the moment but I do have SSH so I imagine I could do it form there) to modify the DNS Zone file. read the whattity what now? Have you gone insane This is an option but I don't think that works if you have a qualified domain already. I mean I could get test.dyndbs-ip.com or somesuch but I was wondering how to update the A records of the DNS zone file for abc.com so that I just needed to change the IP for test.abc.com. As for propagation, I found this to be very quick (I understood that since 2004 .com and .net were/should be updated every few minutes as opposed to twice a day) but if I am outside of the test intranet, I can just elect to use that external DNS server so the updates would be immediate.

manpage

is the *nix way of saying the manual pages

when on a linux system you can type

"man bind" and get info for the given subject
older unix stuff also have info pages

"info bind"

If it were me, I would
1) hack some script to use cpannel
2) contact techsupport

probably not in that order.