DuckDNS on the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter
My current networking home setup consists of the Ubiquiti Networks ERPOE-5 Edgemax as a router and the ZyXEL Dual Radio 11AC Ceiling AP (NWA1123-AC).
So far, I’m reasonably happy with both and I like the idea of being able to just switch access points as new standards come along while leaving the routing/switching part the same. Being able to use PoE also helps reduce the amount of power supplies I have to cram into my little homeserver and networking cabinet.
Comcast provides me with a Dynamic WAN IP Address, but I’d love to be able to e.g. VPN back into my home network without having to know the current IP.
This is where a dynamic DNS service comes in. After a bit of looking around, I picked Duck DNS. They seem to be one of those nice little “it’s free and works for now” sevices run by people as a hobby as opposed to all of the other free services that force you to log into the webinterface every week or to buy their premium plan.
To get your Duck DNS data:
- log into their website and go to their install page.
- Chose the domain you set up from the dropdown and click on the
- Click the “DynDns” button in the “Standards” area of the website.
This should give you the generated token for your account. Now hop on over to the DynDNS Webinterface of your EdgeOS Router. As of 1.7.0, these are the parameters you will have to enter to make it work:
Service: [custom -] duckdns
Hostname: thing in front of .duckdns.org (example.duckdns.org ==> example)
Login: nouser
Password: your generated password
Protocol: dyndns2
Server: www.duckdns.org
If you want to debug a bit on the commandline, you can run the following commands:
Show the current status:
$ show dns dynamic status
interface : eth0
ip address : 12.34.56.78
host-name : example
last update : Mon Sep 7 17:09:29 2015
update-status: good
Trigger an update
$ update dns dynamic interface eth0
Duckdns seems to be a decent free service. Especially for my use of dynamic DNS names which are really not all that important, I opted against moving a domain back over to namecheap and setting dyndns up on a personal domain or trying to use the cloudflare API for now.
Maybe on a rainy day :)