Anyway

I have some minor sites running on the basement OpenSolaris box, and since our IP address changes regularly, I use ddclient to notify DynDNS of the changes. It was working just fine on the old Debian box, but of course OpenSolaris does things differently, and the ddclient package doesn’t come with all the bits you need to make it work.

Step one: download the ddclient package from Sourceforge, and follow the instructions in the README as to where to install it. Easy enough, done.

Step two: go to the DynDNS site, log in to the account, go to the Support Tools section of the website, and click on the “Update Client Configurator”. This takes you to a page that will automatically generate the configuration file for ddclient for your account. This is one of the reasons I like DynDNS, by the way, they think of little useful tools like this.

Step three: make the configuration changes in the ddclient.conf file, and try running the ddclient Perl script to see if it works, using ddclient -daemon=0 -debug -verbose -noquiet to get all the error messages. One tip: if you have spaces in your password, surround it with single quotes, not double quotes. The latter don’t work.

Step four: the hardest for someone new to OpenSolaris is to figure out how to run the daemon. It turns out that Solaris has a “Services Management Facility” (SMF). The specific instructions to follow, once you’ve figured out the basic concepts, are at Chris Gerhard’s ddclient meets SMF. Mind you, I did need to read the documentation on Managing Services to find out where to put the file (/var/svc/manifest). Just as well Sun lets lots of people blog, it certainly makes it easier to find information. I do wish they could figure out how to give their standard documentation memorable URIs though.

Now I just have to wait until our local IP address changes to see if it works. [Update: yup, it works.]