How can I get ddclient to work with freedns?
I use the dynamic DNS service at freedns.afraid.org for my 12.04 server. I had assumed that the protocols would be standardised and that ddclient would just work, but apparently not. I get this message in /var/log/syslog:
ERROR: Invalid update URL (2): unexpected status ()
I tried to use the updated version of ddclient from the alternative PPA described in this answer, but then I hit this error:
FATAL: Error loading the Perl module Digest::SHA1 needed for freedns update.
FATAL: On Debian, the package libdigest-sha1-perl must be installed.
And when I try to install that package, I get this:
E: Unable to locate package libdigest-sha1-perl
Which leads me to this bug report, which apparently has no solution. How to proceed?
Until ddclient is fixed, you can manually install the old module it wants:
sudo apt-get install cpanminus
cpanm --sudo Digest::SHA1
Free DNS's clients page and ddclient --help provide sample ddclient configurations. Restart ddclient for changes to take effect:
sudo service ddclient restart
I was able to get FreeDNS to work by simply editing these two lines in /usr/sbin/ddclient:
From:
my $sha1_loaded = eval {require Digest::SHA1};
To:
my $sha1_loaded = eval {require Digest::SHA};
From:
import Digest::SHA1 (qw/sha1_hex/);
To:
import Digest::SHA (qw/sha1_hex/);
A comment in the bug report suggests that it is "easy to change programs to use Digest::SHA instead of Digest::SHA1".
So the full steps are, first, because add-apt-repository is not installed by default:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
Then, as described by izx:
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nathan-renniewaldock/ppa
Now, this repository contains many packages, but we only want ddclient. So make a preferences file such as `/etc/apt/preferences.d/nathan-prefs and edit it to look like this:
Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-nathan-renniewaldock
Pin-Priority: 400
Package: ddclient
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-nathan-renniewaldock
Pin-Priority: 500
Now install ddclient:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ddclient
Now, become root and edit /usr/sbin/ddclient. Look for require Digest::SHA1 and replace it with require Digest::SHA. Then look for import Digest::SHA1 a few lines later and replace it with import Digest::SHA.
Finally, open up /etc/ddclient.conf and make it look something like this (note the protocol):
daemon=3600
protocol=freedns
use=if, if=eth0
ssl=yes
use=web, web=myip.dnsomatic.com
server=freedns.afraid.org
login=username
password='password'
mydomain.example.com
The main thing I'm not happy about is hacking a file and breaking Ubuntu's package management. A better solution would be to get the PPA fixed.