Tim's blah blah blah

Dyndns at Gandi using Livedns

Running a server at home can be cumbersome as your IP changes, making it difficult for people (including yourself) to find your server when away from home. There are dynamic dns solutions available (e.g. DuckDNS that solve this, but this requires an extra step (i.e. the dynamic dns hostname). Gandi offers an API to edit their domains, meaning that we don’t need the extra step and can update our domain directly. (BTW, besides this, domains also come with 2 mailboxes and a static website, for only ~1€ per month! (no I don’t get sponsored)).

Overview of solutions

It seems several people already solved this problem, so we only need to pick a suitable solution. Below candidates I could find with date of latest commit & number of stars.

  1. https://github.com/Danamir/dyn-gandi/ (January 2021, 45★⭐️, 409 sloc)
  2. https://github.com/brianpcurran/gandi-automatic-dns (Nov 2020, 86★, supports LiveDNS, 420 sloc)
  3. https://github.com/cavebeat/gandi-live-dns (March 2018, 114★, supports LiveDNS, 140 sloc)
    1. https://github.com/wittypluck/gandi-live-dns (supports Python 3, adds some features)
    2. https://github.com/driesdeschout/gandi-live-dns (supports Python 3, adds some features)
    3. https://github.com/dvdme/gandi-live-dns (Supports Python 3, minor update)
  4. https://github.com/AlessioCasco/gandi-dyndns (April 2017, 0★, does not support LiveDNS)

Requirements are:

I settled for wittypluck/gandi-automatic-dns because it’s short and simple, which helps in auditing nobody steals my API key.

Installation

  1. Download & unzip the specific version I audited online 
    wget https://github.com/wittypluck/gandi-live-dns/archive/cf3542714fc52bbf21c1a4d00787a88343b04960.zip -O gandi-live-dns.zip
unzip gandi-live-dns.zip
  2. Configure, ensure nobody can read my key 
    cp example.config.py config.py
chmod og-rwx config.py
cat <<EOF >> config.py
# My config
api_secret='insert key here'
domains={'vanwerkhoven.org':['www','tim']}
ttl='1800' # our IP doesnt change that often, 30min down is ~OK
ifconfig4='https://v4.ident.me'
ifconfig6='' # set empty because we don't have ipv6
interface='' # set empty because else we get local ipv6 address
EOF
  3. Testrun 
    python3 gandi-live-dns.py
    1. If a record doesn’t exist (yet), you confusingly get an error. Error disappears on subsequent runs. 
      Error: HTTP Status Code  404 when trying to get IP from subdomain tim
Can't find the DNS record tim/AAAA in the zone
Going to update/create the DNS Records for the subdomain tim old IP -1 new IP fded:99:0:100:96c6:91ff:fe12:5eec
  4. Automate in cron 
    crontab -e
*/5 * * * * python3 /home/tim/workers/gandi-live-dns/src/gandi-live-dns.py >/dev/null 2>&1

#gandi #dyndns