Why do I *have* to use DynDNS or NoIP if I want to enable VPN?

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thombe wrote:

I want to use dnsomatic to update two services, dyndns and also opendns 

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It wouldn't work, at least not via the Orbi's amdinistration interface. Orbi's admin UI gives you the option using/updating No-IP (or mynetgear.com, which is really through No-IP) or DynDNS for dynamic dns and that's it.  If you were to have a perl script or cron job on a computer behind your Orbi update those, that'd work, but that wouldn't have anything to do with the Orbi itself and you wouldn't need to enable ddns on the Orbi at all.

MY question was "can I enable the VPN Service without explicitly using one of those two services?" which I apparently can't. I did set up a mynetgear account, enabled the VPN and everything is working fine for now, but I suspect they require one of those services to enable the VPN service to generate the configuration files for the VPN clients. When I was setting up the clients, I noticed a reference in the config files to the mynetgear domain I set up, so I edited the mynetgear.com portion to be my normal domain name, and was still able to connect to the VPN just fine.  I'm going to let the mynetgear account lapse (you have to renew it every 30 days, which is a pain) and see if I can still connect to my VPN.  I'll post my results back here so people know one way or another.

Separately, I'll say I'm very pleased with the Orbi so far. Bandwidth throughout my apartment is great and the ease of setting of the VPN - dns question aside - was great. I tried setting up a VPN server on my computer awhile ago and it was a nightmare trying to navigate all the options; having it built into the router was much much easier.