So ddclient can be confusing if you never used it before. I’m still figuring it out. Seemed pretty easy at first, create your ddclient.conf file, run ddclient in a shell and you get no output. It appears to do what it should which is update your dyndns address to point to the current IP address your machine is using for internet access. However it actually demonizes itself, which is not good if you don’t know about it.
So I setup a cron job to run ddclient every few minutes, because when my dynamic IP changes, I only want to have a few minutes downtime before the DNS record is updated. My cron job worked initially, but it caused ddclient to spawn a new process that also became a daemon each and every time. So initial testing was fine, but after a while I had 1000’s of ddclients running. All the memory got consumed and mariadb was killed to save memory, and well that was that 🙂
Currently testing some other things like, using a dyndns key instead of a password, which confusingly you would put in the /etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf file under the heading “password=SOMERANDOMKEYTHATISNOTAPASSWORD”. Logically you would think you delete the “password=” field and replace it with a “key=” field. But maybe its too much to expect a config file to be descriptive of the thing its configuring.
Its still a very useful piece of software if your hosting content on a home server!
