If you have a linux server and want to use the Namecheap DDNS service you will want to use ddclient which is compatible with Namecheap’s service.
How to configure your Linux host with DDclient
http://sourceforge.net/p/ddclient/wiki/Home/
Index
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
All news can be found on the news page but this are the lastest messages
- Important notice: changes are coming
- Ddclient 3.8.1 is finally released
- Preparing for a new release
- Ddclient website moved to trac
You can also check the mailinglist to find out what’s going on.
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.
Ddclient doesn’t have an automatic installation procedure. Get the tar-file from using the download button 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. Instructions can be found on the code section.
When upgrading just replace the ddclient file by the one from the package, read the release notes and modify the cache file.
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 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. Most distributions provide a generic startup sample. You can change it to work with ddclient. As there are to many different distributions, ddclient doesn’t maintain all of them.
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
We 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 use the ddclient mailing list or create a new ticket. Please only post bugs against the latest version of ddclient.
https://community.namecheap.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4745
How to configure DDClient?
The following is the format of configuring ddclient.
protocol=namecheap
server=dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com
login=yourdomain.com
password=your dynamic dns password
yourhost
Here is the example of its usage. If you would like to setup dynamic dns for yourdomain.com (without www), then following is its configuration:
protocol=namecheap
server=dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com
login=yourdomain.com
password=1b9aafgfgjh1865e024fabb629dbd1d9c462
@
If you need to dynamically update a subdomain then you need to subsititute host as subdomain. To dynamically update the domain itself (yourdomain.com), you need to replace host with @.