Dynamic DNS services offer the ability to host services without the expense of paying extra for Internet accounts with static IP addresses. We routinely use DDNS to access our clients' systems for remote maintenance.
We generally recommend static IP addresses for greater reliability and flexibility when the extra cost can be justified...about $15 per month extra.
DynDNS offers free and commercial DNS services. You can use this page to see if you want to upgrade from the free account.
The built-in dynamic DNS feature of SME 7 is useless for users of free DDNS services. The DDNS contrib, on the other hand, works in almost any case. As a general rule, at least until that feature is upgraded, we recommend you disable it, if it is enabled, and install the ddclient contrib. Use 'su admin' if necessary.
Installation
The following command installs the latest contrib as of the date of this writing. You may want to check for a newer version before installing.
At the command line as root:
yum --enablerepo=smedev install sme7-ddclient
Configuring
In the SME Server-Manager, Configuration , Domains, create a new domain that is the FQDN (fully qualified domain name) as listed at DynDNS.
ex: hostname.dyndns.org
Again in the Server-Manager, go to the 'ddclient' page.
- click create next to the new FQDN
- choose your dynamic DNS provider
- enter the login name you use for the dynDNS provider
- enter the password you use for the dynDNS provider
- optionally, enter the mail server host name
- only if you intend to send/receive mail at this domain
- not commonly used with free dynamic DNS services
- mail for this domain may be handled by another mail server
Verification
You can easily verify that your dynamic DNS was updated by grep'ing the log file.
cat /var/log/messages | grep ddclient
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