Hostname-based Access Control for Dynamic IPs

Sometimes less is more. The most simple way to protect my private web space on my web server is this:

<Location />
    Order Deny,Allow
    Deny from All
    Allow from home.schapiro.org
</Location>

But what to do if home.schapiro.org changes the IP every 24 hours and if the reverse DNS entry (PTR) is something like p5DAE56B9.dip0.t-ipconnect.de? When my computer at home connects to the web server the source IP address is used for a reverse DNS lookup. This lookup returns the above mentioned provider-assigned name and not home.schapiro.org,  the web server will never be able to identify this IP as belonging to my home router.

The solution is to write the IP↔Name mapping for my dynamic IPs into /etc/hosts. That way a reverse lookup on the IP will actually yield the information from /etc/hosts and not ask the DNS system.

Since I don't want to do this manually every time my IP changes, I automate it with this script. It reads host names from /etc/hosts.autoupdate and injects them into /etc/hosts:

The script is actually part of the hosts-updater DEB package which also installs a man page and a CRON job to run this every 5 minutes. As a result my own server recognizes my dynamic IPs as authorized and under their "proper" name.