Allen Sandiego's Blog: Setup FreeNAS Dynamic DNS with Namecheap

In my previous post, I discussed about setting up Shinobi on a FreeNAS jail. I also mentioned that in doing this, I will need to port forward my Shinobi jail ip to make it accessible from outside. This way I can view my streams from anywhere.

In this post, I will be writing about how to setup ddns in FreeNAS with Namecheap as the provider. This is recommended if your ISP supplies you a dynamic ip address, which is my case, as opposed to having a static ip address which you can directly assign to a domain or subdomain in your Namecheap Advanced DNS setup page.

There are actually two ways that I know of on how to do this:

Using FreeNAS Dynamic DNS
Using FreeNAS cron job

Using FreeNAS Dynamic DNS

Enter the following information:


Field Value
   
Provider Custom Provider
Use SSL Checked
Custom Server dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com
Custom Path /update?host=%h&domain=[domain]&password=[password]
Domain Name host
Username domain name
Password Namecheap DDNS Password
Confirm Password Namecheap DDNS Password
Update Period 600

Field	Value

Provider	Custom Provider
Use SSL	Checked
Custom Server	dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com
Custom Path	/update?host=%h&domain=[domain]&password=[password]
Domain Name	host
Username	domain name
Password	Namecheap DDNS Password
Confirm Password	Namecheap DDNS Password
Update Period	600

Explanation of fields and values

Provider

This is the DNS provider. However at the time of this writing, Namecheap is not included among the list. So in order to use Namecheap, we use Custom Provider. Fortunately, Namecheap provides a way to update your host's ip address through your browser. This can be done by simply opening the URL and passing the appropriate parameters. You can find more information on this in their Knowledgebase here.

https://dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com/update?host=%h&domain=[domain]&password=[password]

Use SSL

Whether or not Namecheap's custom server is using SSL. Since the URL uses HTTPS, then we check SSL.

Custom Server

This is the hostname in the provided URL earlier.

Custom Path

This is the path along with the required query parameters and values after the custom server hostname in the URL mentioned above. /update?host=%h&domain=[domain]&password=[password]

where:

%h is the value of the field Domain Name
domain is your domain.tld. For ex: google.com
password is you Namecheap DDNS password which can be seen at the Namecheap Advanced DNS page. See sample screen shot below.

Update Period

This is the frequency you want FreeNAS Dynamic DNS service to update your host's ip address in seconds.

Once you've entered all the necessary information, click OK. Make sure the your Dynamic DNS service is running by the way. You can check that by going to the Services tab.

After the update period has passed, go to your Namecheap's Advanced DNS page and check your updated ip address.

Using FreeNAS cron job

As mentioned earlier, Namecheap provides a way to update your host's ip address through your browser.

To use this in a cron job, we simply need to execute a command like curl or wget to access the URL. I'll be using curl in my case. The only difference here is that we specify the host value here as opposed to using %h earlier. For example:

curl "https://dynamicdns.park-your-domain.com/update?host=www&domain=google.com&password=your-namecheap-dns-password-here"

Then specify the preferred schedule. Once the cron job executes, go to your Namecheap's Advanced DNS page and check your updated ip address.

That's it. Enjoy!

References

Setup FreeNAS Dynamic DNS with Namecheap