Home

There is a newer version of this page. You can find it here.

Ddclient is a Perl client used to update dynamic DNS entries for accounts on 'Dynamic DNS Network Services' free DNS service. It currently supports a lot of different routers and a few different services.

Project Admins:

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
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/
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. And so we arrived at github.

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 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.

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

Important notice: changes are coming
Ddclient 3.8.1 is finally released
Preparing for a new release
Ddclient website moved to trac
The old news can be found on 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 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.