pfSense Web UI not showing Dynamic DNS IP address

Question

I'm running pfSense 2.2.6-RELEASE and have configured two DynDNS providers: no-ip.biz and nsupdate.info.

(I added the latter since no-ip.biz started nagging that I need to log in every 30 days and confirm my account – I'm planning to move to nsupdate.info altogether on the long run.)

On the Dynamic DNS status page, no-ip.biz (for which pfSense has a preset) shows me the current WAN IP in green, indicating everything is OK. The entry for nsupdate.info (Service type: Custom) shows 0.0.0.0 (in red) as the IP address, indicating registration failed.

However, when I look up the name in DNS, both come back with the correct IP, indicating both registrations worked – it's just the status info for nsupdate.info that claims something went wrong.

Settings for nsupdate.info are as provided by nsupdate.info:

Disable: not checked
Service type: Custom
Interface to monitor: WAN
Interface to send update from: WAN
Verbose logging: not checked
CURL options: none checked
Username: (DNS name to update)
Password: (host secret)
Update URL: https://ipv4.nsupdate.info/nic/update
Result Match: good|nochg
Description: nsupdate.info

For comparison, these are the settings for No-IP:

Disable: not checked
Service type: No-IP
Interface to monitor: WAN
Hostname: (DNS name to update)
MX: (blank)
Wildcards: not checked
Verbose logging: not checked
Username: (my username)
Password: (my password)
Description: (blank)

I do notice that for the Custom provider there is no hostname field, and the Hostname column on the DynDNS status page is blank for the nsupdate.info entry.

How dows pfSense determine if an update was successful? And why is the successful nsupdate.info registration reported as failed?

Answer 1

It turns out I had several issues with my setup:

The primary error was that the correct Result Match expression is not good|nochg but good %IP%|nochg %IP%. The configuration info shown by nsupdate.info is wrong. According to nsupdate.info issue #207, this has already been fixed in the code, but apparently it hasn't made it to the live service yet.

For custom DynDNS services, the server's response to the update request is compared to the Result Match expression. pfSense will report success on a match, failure on a mismatch. No DNS lookup is done for verification, potentially leading to false positives.

Second, after I'd registered the new host, I had kept the browser tab with the config data open. Turns out that every time the browser is restarted and the page reloaded, a new secret is generated and pfSense is locked out of the unlock API until the secret is updated in its config. That explained the authentication issues.

Finally, it seems my public IP has remained stable across two disconnects – I have my pfSense reconnect once every night, but after two days, I still have the same IP. This has masked my update problems, as the address never changed.