ddclient randomly dying every once in a while

[Almut Behrens <almut_behrens@gmx.net>]

I'm running ddclient in daemon mode to automatically update the
dyndns.org entry when my IP address changes (my ISP forces a disconnect
every 24 hours...).

Problem is, the ddclient daemon keeps dying off sporadically (once in
a month, on average, but irregularly).  It just disappears -- no
corresponding error messages in syslog.  When I restart it manually,
everything is fine again -- for the next few weeks...

Is anyone else observing this phenomenon -- or even better, has figured
out what the issue is?  What other tools are people using for this?

My config is rather trivial:
# grep -v ^# /etc/ddclient.conf 
daemon=300                     # check every 300 seconds
syslog=yes                     # log update msgs to syslog
pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid      # record PID in file.

fw-login=admin                 # FW login
fw-password=my-router-passw    # FW password
use=fw
fw=192.168.1.1/doc/digisdn.sht
fw-skip='WAN IP Address'

protocol=dyndns2               # default protocol
server=members.dyndns.org      # default server

login=my-login                 # default login
password=my-dyndns-passw       # default password

citadelle.homelinux.net


Any ideas how to debug this, apart from running strace for weeks?
(BTW, is there a way to run strace in "circular buffer mode"? -- like
you can set things up under AIX, i.e. not output any tracing info
except when explicitly requested, in which case a trace of the last
N seconds (buffer content) in dumped out to file.)

This is ddclient 3.6.2-2 on a woody machine.

I'm about to set up a watchdog to restart ddclient automatically.
And, maybe, another meta-watchdog to make sure the watchdog is still
running... ;)

Almut