Thursday, January 28, 2010

Happy new year! (+ OVH DynDNS)

Starting this year I'll try to write this blog in English as far as it can be useful or relevant. Rants about Spain will be in Spanish ;)

The first post of 2010 will be about dyndns with ovh. Ovh (www.ohv.es / www.ovh.fr) is a very cheap DNS registrar / hosting / whatever company with datacenters in Europe. Recently I got a DNS domain (for now just for fun, in the future maybe for profit...) and they offer a Dyndns service to update the IP, since my connection is not static. They explain how to change the IP automatically using different programs on different OS's. This, however, is not a easy task if you want to do it "your way".

On debian there are two nice programs to do so, ez-update and ddclient. AFAIK, ez-ipupdate doesn't support NATed machines, so it was out of the question. But ddclient is also not so easy to get to work, because of the sub-prime ovh service. After a lot of trial and error, and thanks to the dyndns.org API page I got the update-url:
https://DYNDNS-USER:OVH-PASSWORD@www.ovh.es/nic/update?system=dyndns&hostname=DOMAIN&myip=IP

Now all the caveats:
- DYNDNS-USER is NOT your ovh user. It's the username created when you activate the DynDNS service at the ovh web interface. In my case is my.particular.domain.com-dyndns.
- PASSWORD is your regular ovh password.
- DOMAIN is the subdomain that you have activated as dyndns-capable at the ovh web.
- IP is... well, guess what...

Here half the work is done, but stil we need to get ddclient working. The proper configuration file is:
protocol=dyndns2
use=web
server=members.dyndns.org
login=some-dyndns.org-user
password='dyndns.org-password'
something-something.dyndyns-dot-org-domain.com

protocol=dyndns
use=web
server=www.ovh.es
login=MYDOMAIN-dyndns
password='MYPASSWORD'
HOSTNAME
The first section is about some other dynamic dns account that we may or may not have. We should at the second section here.
The program complaints about "dyndns" not being a valid protocol string, but both "dyndns1" and "dyndns2" don't work properly with ovh. The rest, I think is already quite clear. In case of doubt just leave a comment :) I hope it will be useful!

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