I have had a Mediasmart Server for many years and it served me well, I have since purchased a Synology and prefer the ease of use and simplicity as compared to the WHS but still use the WHS as a backup tool...it works very well for that.

I no longer have a need to access the WHS from outside of the home and in the last few weeks I have learned much about port forwarding and dynamic DNS. I bought a controller for an aquarium which I am able to access via the internet, it was suggested to use dyndns but I then learned I could just use my username.homeserver.com:9050 to access the controller.

My question is this; is the homeserver.com access reliant on the WHS in any way? I would like to disable the port forwarding to my WHS since I no longer have a need to access it outside of the LAN. If I no longer have a WHS will this still work as my dynamic DNS provider?

Mike

No, homeserver.com is owned by Microsoft and is dependent on WHS for staying up to date with your home IP address. It may work for some time until your IP changes or until Microsoft times out your account for inactivity, but you should not depend on it.

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

I would still be using the service...just wouldn't be using it with the WHS, would it still time out?

There is software running on your home server that updates your IP address with homeserver.com every 15 minutes. If you aren't using WHS anymore, then that update isn't occurring.

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Alex Kuretz
Remote Notification: Monitoring and alerting for your Home Server via email, Twitter, text message, RSS, push notifications, and on your Mac desktop
Have you tried our Add-Ins?

You could leave Remote Access setup and simply not use it. User accounts can be set to not allow Remote Access and you could still use your free homeserver domain to connect to other devices on your home network. I use my WHSv1 landing page to direct traffic to my other network devices to make it easier for my family to access the content on my servers.

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Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8