So I finally got around to setting up a dynamic DNS host for my home linux box. No longer will I have to login to my server and run last to find out what the IP address of my home DSL connection is. Yeah!
I ended up using a client called ddclient to access the DynDns service. It works pretty easy and is fairly painless to setup though I found the config file for ddclient a little unobvious. Anywhere here are the steps for a quick and simple setup. It assumes that you use PPP to connect to your ISP and that the IP address you care about is always bound to ppp0.
Install ddclient (there's a DebianLinux package if you want one).
Edit /etc/ddclient.conf and make sure that it's only readable by the owner because it is going to contain your password to the dynamic DNS service.
syslog=yes mail=nobody@example.com # change to your email address pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid use=if, if=ppp0 # change ppp0 to the correct interface # for your machine. protocol=dyndns2 server=members.dyndns.org login=username # set your username password=MySecretPass # set your password node111.dyndns.org # set your host name- Set it up to run everytime PPP starts
# ln -s ln -s /usr/sbin/ddclient /etc/ppp/ip-up.d/10ddclient
And you're done. Enjoy.