DDNS - DuckDNS not supported out of the box

[Mark van Leeuwen]

Tried to configure DDNS via the GUI of Alt-F 1.0 to use DuckDNS.org. Didn't work at first, found the solutionand thought about sharing here to help others having a similar issue, and maybe improve a future release of Alt-F

First a couple of caveats and suggestions:

1. The hash for the duckdns account needs to be input into the "username", not in "password". This is a inadyn-mt plugin problem, not Alt-F, but maybe useful to know as it is not so obvious.
2. The Alt-F GUI requires the "password" field to be set nonethless, which in the case of duckdns.org is not used anyway. Maybe worth to change that validation rule and make the password field optional in the GUI?
3. The Alt-F GUI writes the DDNS config out into /etc/inadyn.conf while actually the cross platform inadyn-mt is used by Alt-F, and not "godo old" inadyn. This causes confusion while searching for "man inadyn.conf", as many references will describing another file format than the one used by inadyn-mt. The manpage of inadyn-mt suggest the default config file to be called /etc/inadyn-mt.conf, maybe worth it to change the conf file generated by the Alt-F GUI to /etc/inadyn-mt.conf?

Even with proper duckdns settings in the /etc/inadyn.conf the service doesn't start in the GUI (starts and stops immediately), without any error in the logs even in verbose mode. Launching inadyn-mt via command line with 

inadyn-mt --verbose 9 --input_file /etc/inadyn.conf

resulted in an error:

W:LANG: Cannot open language file.  Will use english defaults, or default override (--lang_file <path/file_name>...)
S:INADYN: Could not open default servers_additional.cfg.  Will try svr_add_cfg option, if set...
W:GETCMD: Error parsing option 6 ('--dyndns_system')
SYNOPSIS
[... full inadyn-mt synposis....]

W:MAIN: Main: Error 'RC_DYNDNS_INVALID_OPTION' (0x44).

It simply appears that the whole duckdns provider was actually not known to inadyn-mt. I took the latest servers_additional.cfg from https://sourceforge.net/p/inadyn-mt/svn/HEAD/tree/branches/single/extra/servers_additional.cfg and saved it as /etc/servers_additional.cfg and from that moment, my config worked fine. Is /etc/servers_additional.cfg  missing somehow from Alt-F by accident, or was there another intention?

[João Cardoso]

On Thursday, 28 February 2019 20:28:38 UTC, Mark van Leeuwen wrote:

Tried to configure DDNS via the GUI of Alt-F 1.0 to use DuckDNS.org. Didn't work at first, found the solutionand thought about sharing here to help others having a similar issue, and maybe improve a future release of Alt-F

 

Thank you for the detailed report and the presented solution. I really appreciate.

First a couple of caveats and suggestions:

1. The hash for the duckdns account needs to be input into the "username", not in "password". This is a inadyn-mt plugin problem, not Alt-F, but maybe useful to know as it is not so obvious.

freedns.afraid.org, the only one I use and test, used a similar approach, and the Alt-F webUI asked for the hash instead of user/pass. But when they start accepting user/pass I drop the support for the hash, as that is, I think, a more usual and user friendly solution.

As there are so many providers, I never intended to test each one.

 

1. The Alt-F GUI requires the "password" field to be set nonethless, which in the case of duckdns.org is not used anyway. Maybe worth to change that validation rule and make the password field optional in the GUI?
2. The Alt-F GUI writes the DDNS config out into /etc/inadyn.conf while actually the cross platform inadyn-mt is used by Alt-F, and not "godo old" inadyn. This causes confusion while searching for "man inadyn.conf", as many references will describing another file format than the one used by inadyn-mt. The manpage of inadyn-mt suggest the default config file to be called /etc/inadyn-mt.conf, maybe worth it to change the conf file generated by the Alt-F GUI to /etc/inadyn-mt.conf?

I believe this was a leftover from when inadyn was used. And as inadyn-mt accepted and still accepts the old name inertia has won.

 

Even with proper duckdns settings in the /etc/inadyn.conf the service doesn't start in the GUI (starts and stops immediately), without any error in the logs even in verbose mode. Launching inadyn-mt via command line with 

inadyn-mt --verbose 9 --input_file /etc/inadyn.conf

resulted in an error:

W:LANG: Cannot open language file.  Will use english defaults, or default override (--lang_file <path/file_name>...)
S:INADYN: Could not open default servers_additional.cfg.  Will try svr_add_cfg option, if set...
W:GETCMD: Error parsing option 6 ('--dyndns_system')
SYNOPSIS
[... full inadyn-mt synposis....]

W:MAIN: Main: Error 'RC_DYNDNS_INVALID_OPTION' (0x44).

It simply appears that the whole duckdns provider was actually not known to inadyn-mt. I took the latest servers_additional.cfg from https://sourceforge.net/p/inadyn-mt/svn/HEAD/tree/branches/single/extra/servers_additional.cfg and saved it as /etc/servers_additional.cfg and from that moment, my config worked fine. Is /etc/servers_additional.cfg  missing somehow from Alt-F by accident, or was there another intention?

By accident. Fixed now.

And I tested duckdns.org and it worked as you said: using the token as the username and a dummy password.

Thanks