Fixing Dynamic DNS on Gargoyle

Note: I switched to inadyn on my home server eventually. I left this article because it’s still relevant

I was digging through the logs of my latest Gargoyle installation (a router firmware based on OpenWrt, with a better UI in my opinion), and found out that Dynamic DNS updates were failing.
I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t find any documentation about what to do - the messages, both in the log and in the UI weren’t too informative.
They were either:

Successfully retrieved local ip from url…, so no real error there
Or:

Update of new dynamic DNS service configuration(s) failed
...
Service(s) could not be update properly and have therefore been
removed.

Which gives me no info.
Luckily, it’s all Linux, so I quickly found the configuration files and got to work.
Because my DDNS provider is dnsexit.com, I searched for files containing “dnsexit” in the /etc directory (which is where configuration is usually kept), like this:

grep -r "dnsexit" /etc

I found the configuration in /etc/ddns_providers.conf. You’ll see there the configuration for all of different DDNS providers. I’ll copy my current one:

service dnsexit.com
 url_template   https://www.dnsexit.com/RemoteUpdate.sv?login=[[USERNAME]]&password=[[PASSWORD]]&host=[[DOMAIN]]&myip=[[IP]]
 required_variables  domain username password
 required_variable_names  DyDNS.DoNm,DyDNS.UsrN,DyDNS.Pssw
 success_regexp   /^0=Success|1=IP*/

Using this configuration, we can deduce that hitting the url under url_template while replacing all double-bracketed variables with actual values will try and update my IP, and the response has to match the regular expression under success_regexp. My next action was building this small bash script to try and emulate Gargoyle’s actions:

HOST=BESTHOSTEVER.com
USER=SOMETHING
PASS=SOMETHINGELSE

IP=$(curl -s ifconfig.me/ip)
curl "https://www.dnsexit.com/RemoteUpdate.sv?login=$USER&password=$PASS&host=$HOST&myip=$IP"

Note the line starting with IP. It uses cURL to hit a nice website, which is supposed to return your external IP address. The result I got looked like:

 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
4=IP not changed. To save our system resources, please don't post updates unless the IP got changed.

So it looks like dnsexit says something like “no change is needed. Please don’t bother us for no reason.” According to this document I found, the code returned should be 1 (same IP) and not 4 (stop hammering our servers), because I tried that action once every couple of hours. I can instruct Gargoyle to accept this as a reasonable answer by modifying “success_regexp” to this:

 success_regexp   /^0=Success|1=IP|4=IP not changed*/

After backing up the file, editing and trying again, lo and behold! Everything works!