So, you want to build your own Linux web server so that you can have 100% complete control over your own site? But, there is a problem, your ISP can only provide you with a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) IP address and not a Static IP address unless you upgrade to a business account costing you mega bucks extra per month.

Fear not, there is a saviour in the form of a program named ‘ddclent’.
“DDclient is a Perl client used to update dynamic DNS entries for accounts on Dynamic DNS Network Service Provider. It was originally written by Paul Burry and is now mostly by wimpunk. It has the capability to update more than just dyndns and it can fetch your WAN-ipaddress in a few different ways. Check the configuration pages to find how to do this.”

Most Linux distributions provide a fairly recent version of ‘ddclient’. Use it unless you really need the latest version as most recent updates have only included minor changes. Do a search for it within your software management package and then install.

For those of you that have a disto’ that does not include the perl package, it can be downloaded from Sourceforge.net here https://sourceforge.net/projects/ddclient/files/latest/download

Once installed, head over to:

/etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf  to make changes that match your requirements. There are numerous examples for various scenarios within the file and one that should match your requirements. i.e

Tones: # vi /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. Most distributions provide a generic startup sample. You can change it to work with ddclient.

If ‘ddclient’ doesn’t work as you expected, you can enable debug where you will get verbose messages which should point you in the direction of correction.

Tones: # ddclient -daemon=0 -debug -verbose -noquiet

The documentation for ‘ddclient’ is lacking and what there is, is not very clear.  However, most required information can be obtained from the help file.

Tones: # ddclient --help