Linux OS / Network

Setup OpenDNS IP Updater for Dynamic Networks on Ubuntu 18.04.

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In the past few days, I will try to set up my Cisco Umbrella Security appliance and I come on a problem. I have ADSL and my ISP provider gives me a dynamic IP address. That is mean that I have not the same IP address all the time. In that case, I need some kind of software to inform my router about the IP address.

For Windows users, we can use OpenDNS IP Updater  just download and install. No need for additional tweaks. Same for Mac users – download  Mac IP Updater install it and run. But for Linux users, this is a little complicated.

The first thing that we need to do is to install ddclient. The ddclient is an open-source dynamic IP updater client written in Perl. For Ubuntu we can use terminal and type this command:

#sudo apt-get install ddclient

After we install ddclient we need to modify its configuration file which is located at /etc/ddclient.conf . We need to use the following example to configure a file.

##
## OpenDNS.com configuration
##
daemon=600
cache=/tmp/ddclient.cache
pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid
protocol=dyndns2
use=web if=eth0, web=myip.dnsomatic.com
ssl=yes
server=updates.opendns.com
login=opendns_username
password='opendns_password'
opendns_network_label

Note. If you have spaces in your network label, replace them with an underscore ( _ ). Also, we need to check our network interface. To do that we need to install net-tools ( #sudo apt-get install net-tools ) and after that type #sudo ifconfig -a and see what is your interface. Below you can see my

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr b8:ac:6f:65:31:e5  
          inet addr:192.168.2.100  Bcast:192.168.2.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::baac:6fff:fe65:31e5/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:2697529 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:2630541 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:2159382827 (2.0 GiB)  TX bytes:1389552776 (1.2 GiB)
          Interrupt:17 

When we finished the file need to save it and start ddclient. Please execute the command #sudo service ddclient start in a terminal. You can check its status with #sudo service ddclient status and you can stop it with the command #sudo service ddclient stop

If you wish ddclient automatically start when your system boots you need to type following command

#sudo update-rc.d ddclient enable

Also, you can use Webmin and start ddclient through Webmin dashboard. After we finish all settings we can check our Cisco Umbrella and see is all working good. On the picture below we can see how this looks like on my Cisco Umbrella cloud-based security platform.

Cisco Umbrella cloud-based security platform
Cisco Umbrella cloud-based security platform

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