On Thu, 11 Aug 2005, Daniel McBrearty wrote:
Anyone using ddclient that knows how to configure it to run after reboot? At the moment I start it manually. I looked atthe deb policy manual about scripts to be added to /etc/init.d and the scripts that come with ddclient don't seem to fit (ddclient doesn't accept the start, stop and so on args). If I just have some arbitrary commands to be executed at startup/shutdown, where should I put them? is that the "good way"?
ddclient isn't really a daemon so I don't think it is appropriate to run it from /etc/init.d/... What you really want to do is trigger ddclient to run when the IP address that you are assigned via DHCP from your ISP changes. This could happen at reboot but also when the DHCP server's lease expires if you don't reboot your machine a lot.
I don't run ddclient, but do run something very similar, ipcheck, that does basically the same thing. The machine I run this on is a server that is up basically 24/7, it never is rebooted (unless something bad happens). What I do is run ipcheck from a cron job once an hour. It checks the IP address, determines if it changes and updates DynDNS if necessary. I think ddclient does about the same thing.
To run it at reboot, I would try to tie it in with the configuration of the network interface. '/etc/network/interfaces' is where you have configured your network interface to run DHCP and you can run arbitrary scripts/programs when the interface goes up or down. You should be able to run ddclient when the interface come up. See the man page on interfaces for the details. There are various 'up' commands that allow you to run commands before or after the network interface is brought up.