Dynamic DNS and ddclient
Because I’ve been too cheap to pay for a real domain name, or a static IP address, I’ve been using the wonderful free services of DynDNS.org to bring you this website. I use ddclient to keep DynDNS updated, but somehow I messed it up last night when configuring it for Ubuntu, and murdockfamily.homelinux.org has been unavailable all day. I know, your world had ended without it. I’m sorry! I’ve learned something from this though, and here are my new ddclient tips.
If your webserver is behind a router, like mine, then you need to have ddclient visit a webpage to get the router’s IP address. To make ddclient do this, it’s configuration file needs to have this line in it:
use=web, web=checkip.dyndns.org/, web-skip='IP Address'
My mistake was that I also had the normal 'use’ line in the config file, after that one:
use=if, if=eth1
so ddclient was using the IP address reported by my ethernet card, my local network IP. None of you have access to that one though :-/. To debug ddclient, you can run it from the command line as root with the verbose output enabled like so:
ddclient -daemon=0 -debug -verbose -noquiet
That gives you a pretty good idea of what it’s doing and how you can fix it. At least, that’s all I needed this evening.
Posted by Bryan on April 21, 2006
Comments
Nols April 24, 2006 at 1:48 p.m.
I tried setting the default settings for your blog to just show the article summary, and then I actually have to open the article in a web browser to post comments. That might be the real solution.
Nols April 24, 2006 at 1:46 p.m.
Glad to see the site back up! Before it went down I ran into a problem with Thunderbird and RSS. I opened one of your stories inside Thunderbird and it showed the page, story, and comments, but when I tried to preview my comment from thunderbird, it opened a page in my Firefox and gave me an error. I don't know if this is an issue worth fixing, or if is even fixable, but it might be worth looking at.