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 developers for ddclient on sourceforge. 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.

According to 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

Ddclient 3.8.0 is released
Ddclient 3.8.0 will be there soon
The old news can be found on the news page

How to install

Ddclient doesn't have an automatic installation procedure. Get the tar-file from 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

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 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.

How to 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 usage page describes the most parts of the configuration while the supported protocols page describes the protocol-specific options. If you want to know how to use ddclient with your router, check the 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.

More info about the ddclient project can be found on the ddclient project page on sourceforge