GoDaddy DynDNS for the poor

Recently, I bought a fresh new domain from godaddy.com for my personal homepage that hosted on a server at home. Admittedly, I didn’t really spend any time on customer satisfaction or the stuff they support, they just had the cheapest offer for a .me domain 🙂 So after getting used to their cluttered web interface, I discovered they don’t support dynamic DNS in any way. In such a case, you have several options:

1. Transfer the domain to a registrar that offers dynamic DNS service

The obvious though costly solution if you just bought the domain. It can also take months to complete so that usually a non-option.

2. Use a CNAME and point it do a your DynDNS provider-supplied domain

However, this means only a subdomain (usually www) would point to your dynamic DNS domain. As an example, this is how it would look in my case:

www.peilicke.me -> duff.i324.me

There’s a simple guide in the GoDaddy forum to achieve that with their web interface. But that means wasting the actual domain, not nice.

3. Use the name servers of your DynDNS provider

GoDaddy (and other registrars) allow to replace the name servers and you could use those from your DynDNS provider given they allow it. This is how you could do it with dyndns.org. However, they started charging for that a while ago, to bad.

4. Do it yourself

You only need a script that discovers the public IP assigned to you by your ISP and write a little screen-scraper that logs into go GoDaddy’s ZoneFile Editor ™ fills and submit the A record form. Turns out that other people already had (and solved) those issues, so this is how it could look like:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import logging
import pif
import pygodaddy

logging.basicConfig(filename='godaddy.log', format='%(asctime)s %(message)s', level=logging.INFO)
GODADDY_USERNAME="@USERNAME@"
GODADDY_PASSWORD="@PASSWORD@"
client = pygodaddy.GoDaddyClient()
client.login(GODADDY_USERNAME, GODADDY_PASSWORD)

for domain in client.find_domains():
    dns_records = client.find_dns_records(domain)
    public_ip = pif.get_public_ip()
    logging.debug("Domain '{0}' DNS records: {1}".format(domain, dns_records))
    if public_ip != dns_records[0].value:
        client.update_dns_record(domain, public_ip)
        logging.info("Domain '{0}' public IP set to '{1}'".format(domain, public_ip))

Depending on where you want to run the script, you may need to fetch the dependencies. In my case it’s running on a Synology DiskStation 213. Underneath it’s amazing software stack is an embedded Linux with Busybox. Luckily, it already has a Python interpreter, so for me a wrapper script looks like:

#!/bin/sh
OLD_PWD=$PWD
ROOT_DIR=$(dirname $0)
cd $ROOT_DIR
if [ ! -d .venv27 ] ; then
  curl -O https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/v/virtualenv/virtualenv-1.9.tar.gz
  tar xvfz virtualenv-1.9.tar.gz
  python virtualenv-1.9/virtualenv.py .venv27
fi
source .venv27/bin/activate
pip install -q --upgrade pif pygodaddy
./godaddy.py
deactivate
cd $OLD_PWD

Since your ISP will cut your connection every 24 hours (usually during the night), you would want to continuously run this script by putting it into /etc/crontab. On the DiskStation, you have to use tabs, not spaces and you have to restart crond after editing (It’s explained in the German wiki):

<br />*/5 * * * * root /path/to/godaddy.sh<br />

That’s it.

UPDATE: The code is now versioned on github: https://github.com/saschpe/godaddy-dyndns