DuckDNS seems to have stopped working. It won’t let me log in - all the buttons have just stopped working.
My record last updated in June of this year, but I haven’t noticed since instead of using Wireguard with my home network as an endpoint like I have previously, I’ve since moved to Tailscale which means I don’t need to know the IP of my home network. I also wouldn’t have noticed anyway, because my IP somehow hasn’t changed in all these months. That seems to happen on a serious outage, but rarely otherwise.
In any case, I had left the dynamic DNS in place, because it seemed like a helpful fallback.
Since DuckDNS seems to be no more (I didn’t dig into it very much, it could be nothing, but I did see other reports of folks experiencing outages), I decided to dig into a solution using Cloudflare API tokens, since that seems to be supported and relatively simple to set up.
Setup
In the Cloudflare admin panel, create an account API token with Zone edit permissions for the domain name you want to use. You’ll also need to set an A record for the domain - recommendation is to set it to something that is NOT your home IP so that you tell when it updates successfully.
In OPNsense, configure the following (this is assuming you have the Dynamic DNS plugin installed already under Services → Dynamic DNS):
In the General Settings tab, Backend: select ddclient
In the Accounts tab, create a new record with the following information:
- Description: of your choosing
- Service: Cloudflare
- Username: leave blank
- Password: API token goes here
- Zone:
domain.com - Hostname(s):
domain.com - Check ip method: Interface
- Interface to monitor: WAN
- Check ip timeout: 10 (default)
- Force SSL: checked
Despite taking the time to figrue this out, I have decided for now to leave this disabled. As I said previously, I don’t need it with my current setup, so why leave a domain pointing to my home IP when I don’t need it. Perhaps I’ll have a use-case for it in the future.
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