Dynamically Update DNS When Your Server IP Address Changes

I've been running my website on a Raspberry Pi in my home for years.

Whenever my router got restarted, my home would have a new external IP address, and so I needed to find out that IP address, then log into the registrar I use and update the IP address to direct my domain name to my website server.

My website didn't really need to be live most of the time, so it didn't bother me occasionally changing the IP address.

Recently, I was thinking it must be possible to automate logging into my account and changing the IP address. So I looked up to see if someone had already made a solution, and it turns out there is a standard one. It's called dynamic DNS.

  1. Make sure your domain registrar supports dynamic DNS. You can move your domain to another registrar if not.
  2. Install ddclient on the server. This is one of several options of software which performs dynamic DNS updates to domain providers. It may not support all registrars.
  3. Configure your domain in your registrar to use a dynamic DNS record. Your registrar may have instructions for this.
  4. Configure /etc/ddclient.conf to update the right domain, with the right registrar, with the right password, which you'll find somewhere in your registrar account.
    • e.g.
      protocol=namecheap # check your registrar for which protocol
      use=web, web=dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com/getip server=dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com

      # website 1
      login=thomasrichards.dev
      password='...'
      *,@ # which subdomains to match (here all and none)

      # website 2
      login=thomasrichards.xyz
      password='...'
      *,@       # which subdomains to match (here all and none)
  5. Test your configuration. Read the output of this command carefully to see if it worked or what precisely went wrong.
    sudo ddclient -daemon=0 -debug -verbose -noquiet
  6. Ensure ddclient runs when your server starts. The command may vary by OS.
    sudo systemctl enable ddclient.service
  7. Start the service.
    sudo systemctl start ddclient.service

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fix Controller Input when a Game Doesn't Use Steam Input

Background Knowledge Steam Input is an interface for developers to use the controller configuration built into Steam for their games. It is entirely optional and not all games use it. Steam gives you the option to enable and disable Steam Input on a per game basis. Steam has controller button mapping for in-game, Big Picture Mode, and on desktop (outside of games), and mappings for individual games. By default Steam will give certain controllers a desktop mapping that lets you move the mouse and bring up an on-screen keyboard, which is not what you want in a game. If you press F11 in a game and Steam Overlay doesn't appear and you have it configured to appear, Steam thinks that you are not in a game, and therefore it will use the desktop mapping instead of the in-game mapping. Steam Input works by capturing inputs from your controller, suppressing them from the rest of your system and emitting the inputs that you desire instead to the rest of your system. Problem If you are playin...
Read more

VSC Vanishing Go Imports

With the Go extension installed in VSC, by default if you have an unused import, when you save, it will disappear. If you're like me and you may habitually press ctrl+s, this is very frustrating. After a lot of messing around in VSC's settings. I learned that this "feature" has nothing to do with the settings pertaining to linting or formatting. It's actually to do with automatic import organisation, which you can configure as follows in VSC's settings.json. "[go]" : { "editor.codeActionsOnSave" : { "source.organizeImports" : false, }, } This solution comes from this StackOverflow answer. You can still organise imports with the shortcut shift+alt+o.
Read more

En Dash with ComposeKey (Shift+AltGr)

AltGr is short for "alternative grammar". It doesn't do much on Windows, outside of adding acute accents to vowels and turning '4' into '€'. On Linux it does a much wider variety of things and more things still with 'AltGr+Shift', just give it a try. It's not just for foreign characters but also fractions and arrows. There is also a program called ComposeKey , which Ubuntu and probably many other distros, comes with automatically. If you type 'Shift+AltGr' the next few characters you type will be composed into  a character that sort of resembles that combination e.g. Shift+AltGr, s, s => ß  and Shift+AltGr, =, > => ⇒ . You can alter the config for combinations here:   /usr/share/X11/locale/en_US.UTF-8/Compose  (or similar). Although 3 hyphens does make an 'em dash', 2 hyphens doesn't make an 'en dash'. What I didn't realise until I looked in the config file was that you need 2 hyphens followed by...
Read more