As described in our blog post, as a home user, you can use OpenDNS in two ways: OpenDNS Family Shield or OpenDNS Home. The former does not need a login to OpenDNS, while the latter requires you to set up a free account with OpenDNS.
If you decided to use OpenDNS Family Shield, it takes a single step to use OpenDNS in pcWRT: just select “OpenDNS Family Shield” in the DNS Server dropdown in a profile under Parental Control Settings.
If you want to use OpenDNS Home, there are five steps:
Select your home network in the Settings for dropdown
Click Advanced Settings
Check Dynamic IP Update
Log in to https://www.dnsomatic.com/ with the same OpenDNS username and password. Add the OpenDNS service.
Log in to pcWRT router management console, click Dynamic DNS, select dnsomatic.com from the Service dropdown, then enter your OpenDNS username and password. Click Save.
In pcWRT Parental Control settings, select OpenDNS Home from the DNS Servers dropdown.
So, what if the Dynamic DNS setup page keeps throwing the following error: Failed to update Dynamic DNS, please check your network connection.
I have quadruple checked the username and password being entered. I’m copying/pasting. I’ve tried both my username and my email address that I registered with OpenDNS to setup my account. None of them works.
The PCWRT router IS connected to the internet and when I enter “http://myip.dnsomatic.com/” into my browser, the following is the result:
An auth dialog means USERNAME & PASSWORD provided are not authenticated by dnsomatic. USERNAME is usually your email address registered with OpenDNS.
You might also want to check the WAN ip address on the pcWRT router. Open the Status page on pcWRT router management UI. Does the WAN ip match the IP address you got from dnsomatic?
Do you still have problems? In fact, if the username or password is wrong in your DDNS configuration, the error message should be ‘Failed to update Dynamic DNS, please check your username and password and try again.’.
What’s the Internet IP address as seen on the Status page? What are the DNS 1 and DNS2 values on the same page?
Thanks for the info. That’s a strange problem. Please send us a copy of your configuration, we’ll investigate further. Here’s how:
1. Login router management console.
2. Click System in the Settings page.
3. In the Backup/Restore Settings section, click the Backup button.
4. Save the file and send to [email protected].
Sorry for the problems and thanks for your patience!
I have the same problem. It has to do either with the password length or the characters in the password. OpenDNS allows a wide range of special characters and up to 256 character password length. The only way I could get this to work was by reducing the password length in OpenDNS and reducing the special characters. As a note, I use Keepass2 for my password generation. A 256-bit password with special characters, upper, lower, and numbers will create this issue.
@SafeTay Thanks for your feedback. Our tests showed that dnsomatic fails authentication when the password contains either the apostrophe (‘) or the quote (“). In that case, the router reports “Failed to update Dynamic DNS, please check your network connection.”, which is a wrong message. We’ll fix the error message in a future update. We’ll also see if there’s a way to report the error to dnsomatic. It’s worth noting that the authentication bug does not exist in dnsomatic web interface, only the update API.
We’ll also follow up with a long password test. Thanks for your input!