If you have, like me, an ISP that provides you a dynamic IP, you certainly need to use a dynamic DNS service like DynDNS or No-IP. This is important if you want to use your Raspberry Pi as a server. I personally use No-IP for historic reason since I have my free account for at least 10 years. In that post I’ll teach you how to use their official client as a service under Raspbian.

The No-IP team provides a little program called the Dynamic DNS Update (DUC) Client. DUC continually checks for IP address changes in the background and automatically updates the DNS at No-IP dynamic DNS whenever it changes. This program can be usable under Raspbian without any modifications, only the part for setting up the service is a little touchy. Follow the guide!

Compile the DUC Client

The first thing to perform is getting and compiling the client. Open a Terminal (or use a SSH client, like PuTTY) then enter the following commands:

After that, the No-IP DUC Client will ask you some information:

• The login/email string for your no-ip.com account;
• The associated password;
• The preferences (like the refresh interval).

The No-IP DUC Client is now ready to be used. Time to set up the service now.

Setting up the No-IP DUC Client service

Now that you have a working DUC Client, it’s time to install the service. Doing this will allow the DUC Client to start when booting up your Raspberry Pi.

After passing all these commands, you should have the following output:

Everything is now set up!

Checking if the No-IP service is working

First of all you need to check if the No-IP service is the latest to be run by the Raspberry Pi. Enter the following command:

The output should be something like that:

Running the No-IP service in the last position avoid some problems. For example, if your network configuration is not ready when running the DUC Client, this can crash it with useless error messages. I already configured everything in the additional files provided above to solve this problem.

For checking if the No-IP DUC Client Service is running, just enter the following command:

A correct output should be something like that:

As you can see, the noip2 service is up and running!

To get more information on the noip2 instance running, enter the following command:

This will output something like:

So everything seems fine. Now you can connect to your No-IP account and check if the concerned DNS has been updated, like this:

Wow you did it! Enjoy 🙂

Bonus

You can check for error messages thrown at startup by running the following command:

You can control the No-IP service by using the  service command:

This command will restart the No-IP service (this command takes up to 10 seconds to be run).

References

• How to Install the Dynamic Update Client on Linux
• How to Install the No-IP DUC on Raspberry Pi