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selfhost-utils/mddclient/README.md

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MDDCLIENT

It's a client for dynamic DNS services like Infomaniak's. Like ddclient, but supports sending multiple updates for different domains. I developed this because Infomaniak's DynDns APIS doesn't support multiple domains updates on the same call. So, even if ddclient was supported for a single domain, it was needed to setup multiple instances to update multiple domains (or subdomains) on the same machine.

Compatibility

I wrote this to solve the multiple domain update problem on Infomainak, but should work for every other provider supporting the original ddclient.

Use case

Let's say we have our Nextcloud instance on https://mysite.cloud. As self hosters, we run this instance on our server at home, behind our fiber or DSL provider with a dynamic IP. We need to use ddclient to keep the dynamic DNS updated, so the requests to https://mysite.cloud are sent to our current IP, that may change in any moment. Now we decide to host a Matrix chat instance on https://matrix.mysite.cloud and a Mastodon social instance on https://mastodon.mysite.cloud. We configure ddclient adding the new subdomains in /etc/ddclient.conf, but the requests begin to fail with a 400 http code. This happens because our Dynamic DNS provider doesn't support multiple updates on the same request.

So we need a script that issues an update request for every (sub)domain. This is mddclient.

Setup

Copy the script and the config file into the system to check:

cp mddclient.py /usr/local/bin/mddclient.py
cp mddclient.cfg.example /usr/local/etc/mddclient.cfg

Make the script executable:

chmod +x /usr/local/bin/mddclient.py

Edit /usr/local/etc/mddclient.cfg setting up the server url, username, password and the main domain to update. If you have other domains or subdomains running on the same fiber/dsl, configure them in the subsections as shown in the config example. Run /usr/local/bin/mddclient.py /usr/local/etc/mddclient.cfg to check it is working. Now copy the cron file:

cp mddclient.cron.example /etc/cron.d/mddclient

For increased safety, edit the cron file placing your email address in MAILTO var to be notified in case of mddclient.py catastrophic failure.

Setup is now complete: the cron runs the script every minute and updates the dns.

Optimization

If multiple subdomains are served from the same public url (the same fiber/DSL account) it is possible to optimize the domain updates: when the main one results already up-to-date, the others are not updated. This feature is enabled by default, but can be disabled setting OPTIMIZE_API_CALLS to false in the config.