DDNS Client Hurricane Electric

This document describes the steps to configure the DDNS Client via LuCI to use Hurricane Electric's Free DNS Service. In this example I will show the steps to configure host.example.com domain to update with your router's public IP address.

• A domain name. (eg: example.com)
• A https://dns.he.net/ account
• Installed DDNS LuCI packages, the ca-certificates package
• Download the CA authority certificate with which the portal for dynamic DNS updates is signed. As of 6.1.2017, dyn.dns.he.net is signed by CACert Level 3 CA.
• Import the 3rd party CA authority certs if you get dyndns errors. See ca-certificates package how to import the CACert or any 3rd party certs to /etc/ssl/certificates which might be needed to overcome the problems for failing dns updates due to untrusted certificates.

Login to your registrar or edit your DNS Zone file to add the NS records for host.example.com to point to ns2.he.net, ns3.he.net, ns4.he.net, and ns5.he.net.

1. Login to https://dns.he.net/ and “Add a new domain” for host.example.com
2. Edit the host.example.com zone entry and add click “New A” and enter the Name of “@” and check the “Enable entry for dynamic dns” checkbox.
3. For the newly created A record, find the DDNS column and click the “Generate a DDNS key” circle arrow icon.
4. Generate a new password and copy that text for later before you save the form.

On your OpenWrt router under Services > Dynamic DNS enable the service with this configuration:

• Event interface: wan
• Service: he.net
• Hostname: host.example.com
• Username: host.example.com
• Password: [the DDNS key you saved above]
• Source of IP address: URL
• URL to detect IP: http://checkip.dyndns.com (by default)

Save and Apply.

That should do it. If the above is useful and you use Hover to register a domain you can toss the author a buck credit with this referral link: https://hover.com/hUyus9hH

Remark: While this DDNS may work for IPv6 tunnel addresses, it does not work for auto-updating a dynamic he.net tunnel - at least on a NAT trunk / 3G with Austrian providers. See details for https://forums.he.net/index.php?topic=1994.0 It seems, that the custom url for auto detection of the ipv4 adress is:

https://<USERNAME>:<PASSWORD>@ipv4.tunnelbroker.net/nic/update?hostname=<TUNNEL_ID>
https://ipv4.tunnelbroker.net/nic/update?username=<USERNAME>&password=<PASSWORD>&hostname=<TUNNEL_ID>

These URLs work well with the correct parameters from the tunnelbroker.net website. When using these values or a custum setup Luci-DDNS will always complain about not being able to retrieve the local IP. That may be due to to format of the URL update script's output format. A workaround may be to call wget from within a cronjob.

Check the /var/log/ddns/myddns_ipvX.log and google for the error messages of transport agent. Trying to manually authenticate can help you understand better the error and the root cause.