Updating OpenDNS With a Dynamic IP From an Endian Firewall

The Endian router/firewall appliance comes with a Dynamic DNS client that supports the major DDNS providers, but it doesn’t support updating OpenDNS, which is necessary for any custom settings on your OpenDNS account to be applied to the traffic you pass through their servers.

It’s possible to configure this yourself, though. There’s a helpful post at the OpenDNS forums that describes how to configure ddclient on an Endian to automatically update an OpenDNS account whenever your dynamic IP address changes.

Here are a few additional notes that may help:

  • You don’t need to query an external website for your IP address, since the Endian box already knows it. Set ddclient.conf with “use=if, if=eth0” (or whichever NIC is your red zone).
  • It won’t work if you set “ssl=no”, so you have to leave it set to yes and install the two Perl SSL modules listed in the post.
  • Endian doesn’t have an SMTP server installed, so ddclient can’t send you status e-mails. Comment out the “mail” and “mail-failure” lines to avoid errors.
  • Make sure you don’t have any spaces in the OpenDNS network label or ddclient conf file.

To test if it’s working, you’ll need to get a new dynamic IP.

  • Turn off your cable or dsl modem.
  • Spoof the MAC address on the Endian.
    • On your PC, open a command prompt and type “ipconfig /all”. Copy the value of the Physical Address line. It will look something like 00-4D-B7-D3-5F-03.
    • Go to the Network Configuration wizard on the Endian.
    • In step 4, enter your PC’s MAC into the “Spoof MAC address with” field. Change the dashes to colons so that it looks like 00:4D:B7:D3:5F:03.
  • Shut down the Endian.
  • Turn the modem back on. Wait 15 seconds.
  • Turn the Endian back on.

Once you’ve verified it’s working, you can remove the spoof setting by repeating the steps.

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