Dynamic DNS

From ALSwiki

Contents 1 Create an account with DynDNS 2 Make sure you have ssh and libio-socket-ssl-perl installed 3 Install ddclient 4 Change the ddclient configuration file to use ssh 5 Confirm that it's set to run as a daemon 6 Restart your ddclient 7 Confirm the daemon is running 8 Sign up for the premium account

Create an account with DynDNS

Sign up for an account at this address. Choose a host name set it to point to your current ip address:

 https://www.dyndns.com/account/create.html

Make sure you have ssh and libio-socket-ssl-perl installed

 $ sudo apt-get install ssh libio-socket-ssl-perl

Install ddclient

 $ sudo apt-get install ddclient

The installation will ask some questions.

• For your dynamic DNS provider, select www.dyndns.com
• Enter your fully qualified domain name as created at dyndns.com
• Enter your DynDNS requistered username and password
• Enter "web" as the DynDNS interface to use

Change the ddclient configuration file to use ssh

$ sudo emacs /etc/ddclient.conf

The config file will look something like this:

 # Configuration file for ddclient generated by debconf
 #
 # /etc/ddclient.conf

 pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid
 protocol=dyndns2
 use=if, if=web
 server=members.dyndns.org
 login=your-dyndns-username
 password='your-dyndns-password'
 your-host-name.homelinux.org

Change the line:

 use=if, if=web

To:

 use=web, web=checkip.dyndns.com/, web-skip='IP Address'

Add just after the initial comments:

 ssl=yes
 daemon=300

These two lines tells ddclient to use ssl to connect and to update your public IP address every 5 minutes (300 seconds).

Confirm that it's set to run as a daemon

Open

 /etc/default/ddclient:

It should look like:

 # Configuration for ddclient scripts
 # generated from debconf on Fri Jul 18 13:43:20 EST 2008
 #
 # /etc/default/ddclient
 # Set to “true” if ddclient should be run every time a
 # new ppp connection is established. This might be useful,
 # if you are using dial-on-demand
 run_ipup=”false”
 
 # Set to “true” if ddclient should run in daemon mode
 run_daemon=”true”
 
 # Set the time interval between the updates of the dynamic DNS name in seconds.
 # This option only takes effect if the ddclient runs in daemon mode.
 daemon_interval=”300″

Restart your ddclient

 sudo /etc/init.d/ddclient restart

Confirm there are no errors.

Confirm the daemon is running

 ps -ax
 
 ...
 23741 pts/0    S      0:00 ddclient - sleeping for 300 seconds
 ...

Sign up for the premium account

Dynamic DNS is a good company. Pay the $11.50 per year and help them keep providing a great service.