Hello,

I'm working on building out a small computer hosted from home and
questioning how to provide a dns access to the host. I have a Asus RT-16N
router and while there's a option for DDNS update client, it's not updating
for me. I'm thinking of switching out to DD WRT, but want to hear
everyone's suggestion before going that route. Should I just install
ddclient on the host?

The host will be my personal lab for e-mail (Postfix) and light web
(Wordpress, MySQL).

Thanks!

--
Robert Freiberger
510-936-1210

I'd highly recommend DD-WRT or even DD-WRT micro.

Disclaimers:  (1) I've never been obliged to work with Dynamic DNS.  
(2) I've not run DD-WRT, only OpenWRT (on a Linksys WRT54G v.3, a
device with 4 MB flash and 16 MB RAM -- on which it does well).

DD-WRT seems to come set up to do DDNS out of the box, and the docs look
excellent: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/DDNS_-_How_to_setup_Cus[..]

FWIW, enabling DDNS client functionality in OpenWRT looks pretty simple,
too, going by this page:   http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/ddns.client
to be just a bit simpler.  No need to install ancillary packages.

(Or ability, if memory serves.  DD-WRT is more than a bit of a sealed
box, and somewhat proprietary.)

General (unsolicited, opinionated) advice about picking gateway router /
WAP appliance hardware for embedded Linux:  Heed the supported-devices
pages of your chosen distro (DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc.).  Beware of
low-spec units having too little RAM or flash storage.  The one I
describe above is a decent baseline:  Don't go lower.  You're better off
shopping on the used market, so as to avoid the problem of a shiny-new
chipset from some uncooperative vendor {**cough** Marvell, Broadcom
**cough**} that doesn't yet have good distro-kernel support.

As to the DDclient option (different strategy entirely), this page seems
like a decent guide: http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/wiki/index.php/Quick_HOWT[..]

A couple'a follow-up thoughts:

Probably RT-N16, right?  Congratulations; that looks like a really nice
piece of hardware.   http://dd-wrt.ca/wiki/index.php/Asus_RT-N16

RAM = 128 MB
Flash = 32 MB
USB ports = USB2.0 x 2

Notice that there are instructions to re-flash it back to ASUS's
factory-original firmware, so that you don't burn your bridges.

OpenWRT doesn't yet officially support it (but there's an unofficial
image whose core functions work), because the OpenWRT people are
stubborn about avoiding proprietary drivers, and release versions of the
open source b43 ethernet driver don't yet support the Broadcom BCM43XG
ethernet chip, if I'm reading  https://dev.openwrt.org/ticket/6580
correctly.

I think you'd be quite happy with DD-WRT on it, anyway.

I do.  It's really not too complex to set up.

DR

Robert,

Robert Freiberger <rfreiberger*******>:

My Linksys WRT54G v2.2 is running:

    Firmware: DD-WRT v24-sp1 (07/27/08) std
    Time: 00:12:42 up 80 days, 16:11, load average: 0.11, 0.15, 0.06
    WAN IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

and I've been using (the free service from) No-IP.com for dynamic DNS
for a few years now, no problem. No need to have any of my hosts running
any DDNS clients. DD-WRT v24-sp1 appears to support these DDNS services,
judging from the pull-down menu under the "Setup / DDNS" tab:

    * DynDNS.org
    * freedns.afraid.org
    * ZoneEdit.com
    * No-IP.com
    * 3322.org
    * easyDNS.com
    * TZO.com
    * DynSIP.org
    * Custom

I'm happy with it.

Hope this helps,
Eric
--
Eric De Mund   |  Y!: ead0002
ead******* |  ICQ: 811788

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm going to try the flash of DD-WRT tonight. I
like the idea of ddclient but I'm thinking of using a free system for a
ESXi box, so if possible I would like the router to be the point of updates
rather than one system.

I'm going to test tonight, and post the results. I hope it's stable enough
to host a low traffic site.

Robert

I have dyndns.org and have used both ddclient and router config on
different occasions, no problem.

If ESXi box is behind the same router, and using the same ddns, ddns
account, then just once instance of ddclient on your linux box should
still work since ddns only needs to know your IP Address provided by
ISP.  Once it gets to your router you will have to configure port
forwarding.

Jeff Shippen

--
sports tickets here: http://www.tixwriteoff.com
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