opennic-up

OpenNIC auto DNS updater

Installation

Manual installation

The opennic-up Bash script can be downloaded to your preferred location. The systemd service and timer provided are to be copied to /usr/lib/systemd/system/.

Arch Linux package

If you use Arch Linux, a package is available here and provides a full integration of the automated update process.

Gentoo package

If you use Gentoo, a package is available here and provides full integration for the automated update process.

Scheduled update with systemd time

A systemd timer unit is provided, to enable and start the timer that will update the DNS servers twice a week, use:

# systemctl enable --now opennic-up.timer

Dependencies

The tools awk, sort, uniq, curl, fping, xargs and drill are required and must be found in the environment path. Network Manager is an optional dependency and will be used if installed.

Arch Linux

For Arch Linux users this corresponds to two dependencies on top of the base distribution which will be installed if not already present: fping and ldns.

RedHat, CentOS, Fedora

You will need to install fping and ldns. On Fedora, you will need to install ldns-utils.

Ubuntu

For Ubuntu users, drill is provided by the ldnsutils package.

Gentoo, Funtoo

You will need to install net-analyzer/fping, net-dns/ldns-utils, and net-misc/curl.

Syntax

# opennic-up [options]

options:
    -q  quiet
    -v  version
    -h  help
    -f  <file> custom resolv.conf file

By default, it replaces the DNS servers with the 3 most responsive OpenNIC DNS servers for your location.

• If Network Manager nmcli is found in the path, it is used to update the DNS entries
• Otherwise the /etc/resolv.conf file is updated directly with the new nameservers, keeping the other options untouched
• When -f is used, Network Manager is ignored and the custom resolv.conf will receive the update

Configuration

opennic-up.conf is the configuration file for opennic-up.

opennic-up looks for the file at the location /etc/opennic-up.conf. Alternatively it can be saved in the user location ~/.config/opennic-up/opennic-up.conf and in this case it takes precedence over the former.

• The configuration file defines the OpenNIC member's user and auth used to register one's IP for whitelisting. For example:

user=myusername
auth=TbuARbBxHHGznNScvVLKZDDR9ZGVKdhqxj8dkzCQ

• The number of DNS servers to retain, 3 by default, can be changed using the maxretain option:

maxretain=2

• The minimum required reliability of DNS servers as indicated in the retrieved server list, 90 by default (for 90% reliability), can be changed using the minreliability option:

minreliability=2

• The DNS server used for the initial api.opennicproject.org's name resolution, more than one can be provided for fallback (space separated):

initdns=1.1.1.1 208.67.222.123