OpenWRT project is awesome for sure. It’s free software (open source) and it allows you to use your router the way you want, unlike how they usually come out of the box. That said, there doesn’t appear to be a super vibrant community around it (yet) so some stuff is pretty hard to do. I’ve created an OpenWRT English-speaking Telegram Group (for now) in hopes this might help some more community building.
Anyway, here is what you came to this blog for: Making the DDNS service work in your OpenWRT router – in my case, specifically, this is a Dlink DIR-615 router and I’m working with No-ip.com so you may need to adjust a bit according to your service. But if you have NO-IP or haven’t started yet, then maybe just use No-IP?
Let’s do it.
- Get your OpenWRT router setup with OpenWRT. If you happen to have a Dlink DIR-615 – bonus! Here is my blog post to that. If not, it might still be useful or inspiring for helping you get rolling.
- At the top of the router menu options, go to ‘System’ and then ‘Software’ and click the ‘update lists’ button.
This will pull all the possible packages you can install into your router from the community.
- Before installing other packages, install package named “luci-app-ddns.”
It ‘seems’ that this also installs ddns-scripts when you install this which is another one you need so it’s nice it’s automatically installed with this package.
Important Note: If you cannot find packages, or something is strange during package install, you may need to reboot your router to free up some RAM memory. This happened a few times and after rebooting the router I was then able to update the lists correctly. - Using the same method as the step above, Install the No-IP package for OpenWRT called “ddns-scripts_no-ip_com”
A tab called ‘Services’ should now appear at the top of your router’s menu options because you performed step 3 above. Verify this is good and if some problem, repeat the above steps until you have your tab and possibly you will need to reboot router (see important note above)
- Under new ‘Services’ menu dropdown at top, “Dynamic DNS’ should now be an available option. Here is a link to some No-IP documentation for the client that I found useful. This link here in the ‘OpenWRT configuration’ section was also helpful to me for your reference although it wasn’t No-IP specific.
- In the ‘add’ field at the bottom left, give your service a listing name (I used ‘Noip’ for mine) Then click ‘add’.
- In the DDNS Service provider[IPv4] field, select “no-ip.com” from the dropdown list. Note: even though this is later in the order of fields, do this now.
- Press ‘change provider’ button
- For the ‘Lookup Hostname’ give it your No-IP custom URL without the “HTTPS://” stuff.
- In the “Domain” field, put the same info from step 7 above.
- username = your No-ip username (maybe your email?)
- Password = you guessed it! Your password for the No-IP service
- Under ‘Advanced Settings” I selected “https:// checkip .dyndns .com” from the “URL to detect[IPv4]” field. I found No-IP service wouldn’t work until I chose something from this list. It wouldn’t seem to point No-IP to my router without it…
- ‘Save and Apply’
- At the top right you might (I can’t remember to be honest) see a notification that you have unsaved changes in your router. If so, go and apply those changes to your router.
- Go back to overview list where you started. You should now see your new entry
- Click the ‘enabled’ checkbox
- Press ‘start’ button. You should now see a PID and a number with it and a red icon.
Now, you should be up and rolling and after No-IP has a bit of time to apply the changes your router should now be accessible by the URL you put in step 8 above.