Friday 13 July 2012

Turn Off, Switch On!


It matters not how good No-IP's service might be (and it is good) if you don't think before you act. This week I had to attentd to an urgent matter that required access to files on my server: no problem I thought, I can access them from work (during my lunch break, of course!) using NoMachine.

Except I couldn't!

It took several hours of racking my brain to figure out why my IP address hadn't been updated by the No-IP client before I realized that it wasn't updating the DDNS server because it wasn't running! I'd rebooted my server after a software update and had never restarted the client. Clearly, if you are as absent minded (read, stupid) as I, it's better to start the client automatically every time the pc boots and, fortunately, this is easy to achieve.

Open a terminal and login as root:

sudo -i

Then add the client to the startup file (/etc/rc.local):

echo '/usr/local/bin/noip2' >> /etc/rc.local

Remember to exit from root & the terminal by typing exit twice:

exit

exit

In my defence, I had implemented a fail-safe using email and file copies, so all was not lost. More to the point, I was actually pretty chuffed that I'd figured out the problem without resorting to Google, so all-in-all the episode was far from a disaster.

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