Changing DNS provider

My domain is with Porkbun and up until now I have used them to manage my DNS. I also used the built in Dynamic DNS service on my tplink router to have my domain reachable on the internet. To have more control over both these configurations, I switched to Hurricane Electric (HE) and ddclient. Switching the DNS provider was easy. Change the nameservers on Porkbun and add the DNS entries over at Hurricane Electric and we are done. Its a manual process and although easily fixable, it’s easy to make an error. Neither Porkbun nor HE provide any export/import function 🤷‍♂️️.

My ddclient configuration (/etc/ddclient/ddclient.conf) looks like this:

daemon=300                  
syslog=yes                  
pid=/var/run/ddclient.pid   
ssl=yes                     
use=web                     
protocol=dyndns2            
server=dyn.dns.he.net       
login=<A record name>             
password=<A record key>   
simbly.me

The login is actually the name of the A record in HE DNS records which points to the IPv4 address of the server. There’s a checkbox that needs to be checked to allow overwriting the IP address as it changes. The password is the key assigned to this A record. The ddclient config file is prepopulated with other DNS providers configuration to make it easier to change the configuration. Once the configuration change was done, all that’s needed was to enable and start the ddclient service with the help of systemctl. The ddclient however did not attempt to make any IP address change and the syslog remained empty without any indication as to what was happening. Couple of minutes of internet sleuthing led me to a forum where the solution mentioned was to delete the ddclient cache file located in /var/cache/ddclient/ and then restart the ddclient service. One way to verify whether ddclient is working or not is to check the output of sudo ddclient -daemon=0 -debug -verbose -noquiet. It should say SUCCESS towards the bottom:

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