Saturday, May 21, 2011

Cloud-based Cross-Platform IP Address Updater for OpenDNS/DNS-O-Matic

When I moved from Windows to Ubuntu one issue I was facing with OpenDNS lack of an automatic IP address updater for Unix platforms. They do point to a ddclient utility but I wasn't comfortably able to configure it on my box. Hence I sat down to wrote a few lines of PHP code which can be used in either of the following ways:
  1. Through PHP_CLI commandline (and thus you can add it to the startup scripts in /etc/init.d)
  2. Most of the Unix installations have Apache PHP built-in. You can have this scripts in one of the aliased directories, have them bookmarked as home page in your browser. So when you launch the web browser your IP address automatically gets committed to OpenDNS catalog through DNS-O-Matic.
Note: OpenDNS takes three minutes to propagate the changes to the account to all related caching servers.  Hence in this period websites that do not fall within the context of your block settings may be browse-able on your system.
The PHP script to auto-update DNS-0-Matic (and hence OpenDNS) account (You only need to make changes in line numbers 2 and 3. You can download autoupdate.php from Sourceforge at this URL.


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