I recently moved my dynamic DNS hostnames from dyndns.org (now owned by Oracle) to No-IP. In the process, I moved all of my hostnames under a sub-domain that I control in case I ever want to self-host the authoritative DNS server for it.

Creating an account

In order to use my own existing domain, I registered for the Plus Managed DNS service and provided my top-level domain (fmarier.org).

Then I created a support ticket to ask for the sub-domain feature. Without that, No-IP expects you to delegate your entire domain to them, whereas I only wanted to delegate *.dyn.fmarier.org.

Once that got enabled, I was able to create hostnames like machine.dyn in the No-IP control panel. Without the sub-domain feature, you can't have dots in hostnames.

I used a bogus IP address (e.g. 1.2.3.4) for all of the hostnames I created in order to easily confirm that the client software is working.

DNS setup

On my registrar's side, here are the DNS records I had to add to delegate anything under dyn.fmarier.org to No-IP:

dyn NS ns1.no-ip.com.
dyn NS ns2.no-ip.com.
dyn NS ns3.no-ip.com.
dyn NS ns4.no-ip.com.
dyn NS ns5.no-ip.com.

Client setup

In order to update its IP address whenever it changes, I installed ddclient on each of my machines:

apt install ddclient

While the ddclient package won't help you configure your No-IP service during installation or enable the web IP lookup method, this can all be done by editing the configuration after the fact.

I put the following in /etc/ddclient.conf:

ssl=yes
protocol=noip
use=web, web=checkip.dyndns.com, web-skip='IP Address'
server=dynupdate.no-ip.com
login=myusername
password='Password1!'
machinename.dyn.fmarier.org

and the following in /etc/default/ddclient:

run_dhclient="false"
run_ipup="false"
daemon_interval="3600"

Then restart the service:

systemctl restart ddclient.service

Note that you do need to change the default update interval or the checkip.dyndns.com server will ban your IP address.

Alternatively, just setup your own lightweight IP address echoing service and avoid the problem entirely.

Testing

To test that the client software is working, wait 6 minutes (there is an internal check which cancels any client invocations within 5 minutes of another), then run it manually:

ddclient --verbose --debug

The IP for that machine should now be visible on the No-IP control panel and in DNS lookups:

dig +short machinename.dyn.fmarier.org