If you are publishing Merlin projects from a computer that has a dynamically generated IP address, this can cause problems for your users already having received the project URLs and use in the meanwhile obsolete IPs to access the projects.  This situation easily occurs, as the IP address of your router changes upon re-connecting to your internet provider.

In this case the actual project URLs will fall out of sync with the URL and IP address that Merlin has originally published. Fortunately, there is a solution readily at hand allowing you to create a static host name that can be used instead.

You may use a DynDNS account (stopped offering free accounts) or an alternative such as noip.com. The service will then convert the dynamically generated and ever-changing IP address that your router obtains from your ISP to a static host name and automatically route to your location. This way you will have a reliable URL that can be used for accessing Merlin projects over the internet (by a web browser, the Merlin iOS app or remote opening from another Mac) which otherwise would not be possible.

Please find hereafter some info on how to set a free host with Free DDNS and noip.com:

1. Call in your web browser http://www.noip.com/ and click onto ‘DNS’
2. Scroll towards the bottom to see the features of Free DDNS and click onto ‘Sign up’
3. You will be asked to enter information for creating your account by noip.
4. When done click onto ‘Free Sign Up’ further down in the window.
5. You will receive an email telling you how to activate your account.
6. Log-in once again into noip,  navigate to ‘Hosts/Redirects’ (‘add a host’ in case you don’t see one listed) and click the ‘modify’ button to check your hosts settings.
7. Make sure its type is ‘DNS Host (A)’.
8. Close the window and note your hostname; for example merlin-pws.no-ip.biz

Once you have identified your static host name as provided by noip.com, you can now use it to access all Merlin projects you will be publishing. This means, let’s assume you’ve started ‘project’, ‘web’ and ‘iPhone’ publishing for a project called ‘Client Website’ using Merlin on your Mac…

Merlin generates following URLs for your published project: 

merlin://123.456.789.012:7090/Client-Website
http://123.456.789.012:7080/wa/default?title=Client-Website
merliniphone://123.456.789.012:7080/wa/default?title=Client-Website

You can swap out the IP address 123.456.789.012 with the hostname merlin-pws.no-ip.biz and propagate following URLs to remote users accessing the Merlin project over the internet:

• merlin://merlin-pws.no-ip.biz:7090/Client-Website (For Merlin users)
  
• http://merlin-pws.no-ip.biz7080/wa/default?title=Client-Website (For Web browser users)
  
• merliniphone://merlin-pws.no-ip.biz:7080/wa/default?title=Client-Website (For iOS app users)
  

Updated:

by Vicky Stamatopoulou

Revised text and screenshots