Home

PageOutline

= Important notice = There are a few changes coming.

• Because of some recent personal changes I'm not having enough time to work on this project any more. There are only some obvious bugreports which get solved quickly but others stay there forever.
• Dyndns decided to change their business model and [http://www.dyndnscommunity.com/questions/21580/from-dyn-what-happened-to-free-accounts.html they stopped offering free account]. It made me decide to make dyndns less important for ddclient.
• Sourceforge [http://sourceforge.net/blog/hosted-apps-migration-update/ decided to retire the hosted apps] which means this trac environment will come to an end.

All these announced changes made me decide to move ddclient away from sf.net. The idea is to put it on an environment to make it easier for others to contribute. More news will be here soon.

= Introduction =

DDclient is a Perl client used to update dynamic DNS entries for accounts on Dynamic DNS Network Services' free DNS service. It was originally written by Paul Burry and is now maintained by [http://sourceforge.net/project/memberlist.php?group_id=116817 developers for ddclient on sourceforge] . It has the capability to update more than just [http://www.dyndns.com dyndns] and it can fetch your WAN-ipaddress in a few different ways. Check the configuration pages to find how to do this.

According to [http://linux.cudeso.be/ cudeso.be]:

DDclient is a small but full featured client requiring only Perl and no additional modules. It runs under most UNIX OSes and has been tested under GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. Supported features include: operating as a daemon, manual and automatic updates, static and dynamic updates, optimized updates for multiple addresses, MX, wildcards, abuse avoidance, retrying failed updates, and sending update status to syslog and through e-mail.

= News =

• [https://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=116817&id=308798 Important notice: changes are coming]
• [https://sourceforge.net/news/?id=301973&group_id=116817 Ddclient 3.8.1 is finally released]
• [https://sourceforge.net/news/?id=291691&group_id=116817 Preparing for a new release]
• [https://sourceforge.net/news/?id=274333&group_id=116817 Ddclient website moved to trac] The old news can be found on [https://sourceforge.net/news/?group_id=116817 the news page]

= Installation = Most distributions have a recent version of ddclient. Use it unless you really need the latest version. On debian-based systems you can run {{{ apt-get install ddclient }}} and it will install ddclient Unless there is a good reason, you should't use the download link.

= Download = Ddclient doesn't have an automatic installation procedure. Get the tar-file from [http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=116817 sourceforge] and untar it. Copy the perl script to your favorite location (ex. /usr/sbin) and create a /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf configuration file. Don't forget to create the cache directory.

If you want the bleeding edge of ddclient, you can access the latest version using;

{{{ svn co https://ddclient.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/ddclient/trunk ddclient }}}

= Configuration = If you installed ddclient by using the installer of your distribution, it probably already asked you some questions and prepared a useful config file.

There are a few configuration examples provided which you can copy to /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf and modify. More info about the configuration can be found on the [wiki:Usage usage page]. There's also a sample configuration delivered with ddclient.

A typical configuration like: {{{

/etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf

protocol=dyndns2 use=web login=mylogin password=mypassword myhost.dyndns.org }}} You can run ddclient as "/usr/sbin/ddclient -daemon 300 -syslog" and put it in your startup scripts. There are samples of startup scripts provided with ddclient.

= Upgrade = Replace the ddclient file by the one from the package, read the release notes and modify the cache file.

= Documentation = The documentation about the configuration has been split into three sections. The [wiki:Usage usage page] describes the most parts of the configuration while the [wiki:Protocols supported protocols] page describes the protocol-specific options. If you want to know how to use ddclient with your router, check the [wiki:Routers supported routers].

Debugging ddclient looks pretty hard but it isn't. First try to put as less as necessary in your configuration. Try to run {{{./ddclient -daemon=0 -noquiet -debug}}} and check the result. Try to add the features you need and check it again.

Once you're happy with the result, run it as a daemon.

If this doesn't work for you, there are a few places where you can look for help. If you need any help in configuring ddclient, you could try ddclient --help. It should give you all the possible configuration options so.

If you think your configuration is correct, but ddclient doesn't work as you expected, you can enable debug and verbose messages by running {{{ ddclient -daemon=0 -debug -verbose -noquiet}}}

I know the manual is not very clear, you have to read the example configurations included in the tar-file or you can run {{{ddclient --help}}} to get more help.

= Help and bugreporting = If you need extra help, have any bug to report, an enhancement to submit or a feature request, you can [/newticket create a new ticket]. Please only post bugs against the latest version of ddclient. The old tracking system can be found on the project page.