r53-ddns

r53-ddns

A DIY DynDNS service build upon AWS Route53

Setup

This tool will try to determine the current external IPv4 and IPv6 address of the host and then update an entry in a domain at Route53. To do this you obivously need a domain hosted at R53. If you already have a domain somewhere else you can e.g. create a seperate subdomain like dyn.yourdomain.com which gets delegated to R53 so you don't have to change anything in your current DNS setup or migrate the domain.

AWS costs

The costs you should be facing running this setup on AWS will be $0.50/month for the hosted domain in R53 plus $0.4 per 1M requests. So you will pretty surely never exceed $1 even after adding tax.

WARNING: Pushing just one wrong button in the AWS Console can cost you a lot of money. So if you play around with cloud stuff, always configure a "Billing alarm" so you wont be surprised at the end of the month with a big bill :)

IAM Permissions

You need to create an IAM user which has the permission to update records on the domain you want to use for DynDNS which should look like this:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "route53:ChangeResourceRecordSets",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:route53:::hostedzone/<ZONE_ID>"
        }
    ]
}

Because this gives access to the complete zone, using a seperate subdomain like desribed in the setup section is a good idea.

Running this tool

Put the AWS keys you just created in the ~/.aws/credentials file of the user which will run this tool and then create a cronjob looking like this which will call the tool every 15 minutes:

*/15 * * * * /usr/local/bin/r53-ddns -zone-id <ZONE_ID> -domain <DOMAIN_NAME>

Either wait until the first run or start the tool manually once and check the R53 dashboard for your newly generated AAAA and A records.