I.T. Giffen.cloud | my useful/less byte of technology

16 May 2021

GitLab Certified Associate Certification

I’ll be honest; I’ve little experience using Git, or any other versioning software for that matter. I have had an interest in Git for a while now though. Mostly for keeping a personal code repo; scripts for working in the Azure and AWS clouds, PowerShell scripts for system administration tasks, and most recently to use to learn and deploy Docker and Kubernetes in my home lab. Previously, I just never thought that I had had the time to learn it. So when I stumbled across a link to register for FREE, for the GitLab Certified Associate (GCA) Training and Exam, I decided “What the hell. let’s do it!” (The link only lasted 2 days before they took down the free offering due to overwhelming interest, so sorry folks, I can’t provide you with the link.)

In my personal opinion, this certification is much more of a knowledge certificate than a technical certification. I feel like the course is designed to take you from 0 to drive. You cover all the basics and afterward, you’ll be able to jump right into using git without feeling like an imposter. If you have no experience, like me, this is the perfect place to start. If you’re already familiar with Git, well tough… You’ll still need to get the GCA before you can get one of their ‘specialist’ or ‘professional’ certifications. More info on their more advanced certifications can be found here.

The hands-on, self-paced, training lab was informative. There was definitely a sprinkle of marketing in there, like the inclusion of GitLab’s history. But they did do a good job of teaching the various Git concepts and terminology. They also included a bunch of labs to work on while proceeding thru the training. The hands-on portion, doing labs, was by far my favorite part. I like to learn by doing. So doing stuff like making a pull request, making changes in the WebIDE and from the command prompt, tagging code, and committing code to a project was what really made the training count. I also was able to recall that hands-on training to complete the exams later on. Like I mentioned early, I didn’t think I had the time to commit to learning Git… Well by spending 1-2hrs a night, for just a few nights, I was totally able to learn how to use Git.

The exam was twofold. One part was a “written” exam with questions you had to answer. The second part was a “lab” exam where you had to work a project and submit that project for grading. The written exam was not too bad. They give you a series of questions and you have to score 100% on them before you can proceed to the “lab” project exam. The questions dealt with terminology and things that GitLab could do. Honestly, if you did the labs, it was pretty easy as they had already covered all the information. I didn’t feel like there were any surprises or gotchas. I was a little more worried about doing the “lab” project. But again, having done the hands-on training labs, it was pretty straightforward of an exam. Some of the verbiage in the lab instructions had confused me up, and I had to reread the task it asked for a couple of times. But in the end, they again were only asking you to do stuff they had covered in the training materials. So nothing too bad if you take your time to complete it.

I feel like unless you work in development or DevOps, this is not going to be a high-priority cert for you to get. For most folks, I feel that this certification is going to more of a skill that they can add to their resume to show one more item that they are knowledgeable in. That said, it won’t hurt any to get the GitLab’s GCA if the opportunity presents itself like it did for me. You never know what you will be working on 1, 2, 5, or even 10 years from now in the future. IT is always changing. Who knows…. Tomorrow could come, and you or I might find ourselves in some sort of role needing to deploy code to a production CI/CD pipeline and using GitLab to commit our code change and push it. You never know… It could happen and when it does you’ll be happy you got yourself the GCA.

Category: Training | LEAVE A COMMENT

23 April 2021

Owlcam Dashcam

My vehicle got broken into 3 times within a year. I was getting tired of going down to my car, and then feeling violated after realizing someone had broken into it. I was also getting tired of paying the deductible to get the car fixed after each break-in. I needed to find a solution! With so many things these days being ‘cloud-based’, ‘always on’, or ‘IoT connected’, I found it odd that there isn’t a large market of dashcams battling it out in this arena. Cellular connected “smart” dashcams seem to be a fairly new-ish niche in the dashcam market and there are currently only a few players. The Owlcam dashcam caught my eye early on in my searching and ultimately, in the end, they are who I chose to use as the dashcam on my vehicle for now. Other brands/vendors are now making products though, so it’ll be interesting to see how this niche matures and what sort of dash cameras and features will become available.

So I’m creating this writeup as I wasn’t able to find a lot of info about Owlcam when I was looking into dash cameras. There were a few mixed reviews that were helpful, highlighting the good features and those that still needed improvement. And a few bad reviews I found of Owlcam that were usually not of the camera itself but related more toward the business of what happened when the original startup was bought out (ie – service interruptions and service cost increase).

Important note: This review consists purely of my own opinions and feelings about the Owlcam device. I have not been compensated in any way.

I’ll be reviewing the Owlcam 5.0 in this article, it’s Owlcam’s newest camera. Its main improvements include IR LEDs to better light up the interior of the vehicle – even in pure darkness, 160GB onboard storage which equates to 160 hours of video, and a new “OK Presto, I’m being pulled over.” voice command to record your interaction with any law enforcement.

Like its predecessors, it still includes 4G LTE, A.I. surveillance, live video view into the vehicle, two-way talk with the vehicle (great for parents of driving teens), voice tagging, anti-theft beacon, video history, real-time alerts and notifications, and reports you can forward to your insurer to expedite your claim. One feature (or rather perk that I hope I never have to use) that I really love about Owlcam is that if someone breaks into your vehicle and steals your dashcam, they will replace it for you if you provide them with the video and police report. Since your video gets pushed to the cloud, it’s not a problem to retrieve. If that were to happen with any other brand of dashcam, you’d have to drop both the cash to replace the camera on your own and then dole out your insurance deductible to fix your ride.

The box is nothing fancy. It lists all of the dash camera’s specs on it.

It opens up and has a card describing everything that is inside the box and instructions.

The OwlCam is small enough that it easily fits into the palm of my hand.

It was pretty easy to plug the connector into my vehicle’s OBD port and route the cable up to the center of my windshield. I used their tool to tuck the cable out of view. I then attached the appropriate tailpiece for my vehicle for the mount and stuck it up in my front window. The camera has a magnetic point on the bottom of it that “snaps” onto the mount. That was it. In less than 15 minutes, I had opened everything, read the instructions, and installed it in my vehicle. So simple!

I download the Owlcam app from the App Store before I had gone out to install my dashcam. After I mounted the Owlcam, I started the car which also turned on the Owlcam. When you first start the OwlCam it will display a QR code. From the OwlCam app, you can scan the QR code and it will join/link your OwlCam to your account. I was instantly able to start viewing a live feed from my Owlcam. That part of the setup only took a couple of minutes and it too was simple! The app itself is pretty easy and intuitive to tap thru and find either the settings or the video clips you have saved.

Overall the OwlCam dashcam is super simple to install and set up. I’ve been impressed with how easy it was. Now comes some time for “field trials”… I’m going to try it all out for a week or so and I’ll report back, in this post, about how I feel about it and any likes/dislikes after I’ve had some time to actually utilize it.

Day 1: It’s been over a day now that I’ve had it installed and I got to drive around and try it out. I’ve got no problem admitting that I’m still on the learning curve trying to figure out what all it can do. Being my first dashcam, it’s going to take me a bit to get used to it.

The camera itself seems to be working as expected. It’s recording both the interior and exterior. I’ve been able to successfully issue the “OK presto” command and tag clips while driving. I’ve also been able to fetch the clips on my phone from the device. I can’t wait to catch my wife on camera being silly, hee hee hee. For those of you who are curious, when giving the “OK presto” command, it’ll tag a 21-second clip for you. One thing that I have yet to figure out is the difference between “OK presto” and their new “OK presto I am being pulled over” commands. The latter being one of the new features that they tout about the 5.0 camera.

My biggest disappointment so far is that no notifications have popped up on my cell phone. NO ALERTS AT ALL! I have the Owlcam app set up to notify me of ‘Yellow’ events. These are small movement events. The camera is successfully catching stuff because when I look in the app, I can see it catch the movement of my neighbor either parking his car or leaving. I’ve triple-checked my iPhone and the app definitely has permissions to give notifications. So…. What gives? How will I know if someone is peeping into my vehicle. Or worst case, and my biggest concern, will I even be alerted on a ‘Red’ event if someone is breaking into my vehicle. I’m hoping this is just user error on my part.

Day 5: So the “no alerts” issue has been fixed. I did end up opening a support ticket for it though. Support was easy to work with and pleasant enough for me. It ended up being an issue on their end and they got the problem patched up. I was actually surprised when the first alert came though as I hadn’t realized it was fixed.

The camera itself has been working well. The video quality has been good. My only current complaint is that when pulling the video history and watching it, it can be a bit grainy and laggy streaming it to my phone. The exported video isn’t bad, just the streaming video.

Day 8: So I’ve had the dash camera for just over a week now. It’s a neat device. It definitely does what it claims. It records what going on, both inside and outside the vehicle. It’s AI is pretty good at recognizing movement and bumps. I’ve been able to get yellow alerts (tracking movement) and red alerts (bumps). The “bumps” were actually from getting my vehicle serviced, not from bumps “in the wild”.

While I don’t have personal experience with any other dash cameras, I have to say that this dash camera has met my desires. It will alert me when someone breaks into my vehicle, I’m comfortable enough to believe in that.

The application (at least on iOS) isn’t bad. It’s pretty intuitive overall. My main grievance with it is actually with managing the video clips. Deleting unwanted clips takes more work than it should be. You have to select and delete each clip individually, and the fact that it records both the internal and external clip for each ‘event’ it captures, means that you have to do multiple taps to delete. There should be an option to select multiple clips and remove them. Anyways, that is just my two cents…

Overall Opinion: It’s a keeper. If you’re in the market for a new dash camera, I would recommend that you check out the Owlcam and compare its features to other cameras that you are considering. I think you’ll find it impressive and that it’ll be worth your while!

Category: Gadgets | LEAVE A COMMENT

23 April 2021

WordPress tweaks

(Updated 12/6/2021) Here are a few tweaks that I have found and use on my WordPress installs to harden them and improve security. This post is mostly for my own benefit – for when I have to stand up a new server and can’t recollect what I did to my current server/site…. That said, I hope it helps you too.

Please note: While these work for me… I can not guarantee they will work for you.
Please make a backup of your site before you make any changes. I’m not responsible for any changes you make.

Follow my post about adding a SSL certificate to your site.

2. The one comes from the ReallySimpleSSL plugin. It’s a great plugin to use to migrate your site to SSL. Anyways, in one of their articles (link) they go over some settings to add to your site’s htaccess file. Please read their article, before adding the following lines so you understand what each is doing. (Just for reference, here is an article describing how the htaccess file works). If you are running bitnami, try look in “/opt/bitnami/apps/wordpress/conf”.

Header always set Strict-Transport-Security: "max-age=31536000" env=HTTPS
Header always set Content-Security-Policy "upgrade-insecure-requests"
Header always set X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff"
Header always set X-XSS-Protection "1; mode=block"
Header always set Expect-CT "max-age=7776000, enforce"
Header always set Referrer-Policy: "no-referrer-when-downgrade"

Another header that now needs to get added to your htaccess file is a “permissions-policy”, more info can be found here.

Header always set Permissions-Policy "geolocation=(); midi=(); notifications=(); push=(); sync-xhr=(); accelerometer=(); gyroscope=(); magnetometer=(); payment=(); camera=(); microphone=(); usb=(); xr=(); speaker=(self); vibrate=(); fullscreen=(self);"

After updating your htaccess file, restart your apache service using the command below,

sudo /opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart apache

Then scan your site’s headers using SecurityHeaders.com to verify that you pass with an A+.

3. A backup/restore solution for your site. I use and recommend the plugin called Up d raftPlus.

4. A solution like WPS Hide Login to hide the normal login page. This will help reduce login attempts done by bots.

5. A firewall and malware scanner solution like Wordfence.

6. Run your site’s URL thru the Qualys SSL Server Test, and address any SSL shortcoming the server might have.

That’s it for now. I’ll try to update this post with more tweaks and hardening suggestions as I implement things.

Category: Bitnami, WordPress | LEAVE A COMMENT

23 April 2021

Cannot open the Outlook window. Invalid XML

Microsoft Outlook has got to be one of the most common business applications that just about everyone uses. So when it fails to open, it can feel like the start of a bad day. One error message that I have encountered a few times now is the “Invalid XML” message when trying to launch Outlook. The most common reason for this error is that the XML file that contains the settings for Outlook’s navigation pane has become corrupted. The navigation pane is the one that is on the left side of Outlook and lets you change between your mailbox, folders, calendar, contacts, tasks, etc.

So how do we fix the error? The first thing to try is to simply reset the navigation pane.

Hit ‘Windows+R‘ on your keyboard to open the ‘Run‘ window.
Type in the following command: Outlook.exe /resetnavpane
Hit the ‘OK‘ button.
Then re-launch Outlook to verify that everything is working.

If the above action did not resolve your Outlook issue, then the next course of action would be to delete the actual XML file and force Outlook to generate a new/fresh file the next time it opens. Here’s how we can do that.

Hit ‘Windows+R‘ on your keyboard to open the ‘Run‘ window.
Type in the following command: %AppData%\Microsoft\Outlook
Hit the ‘OK‘ button.
It will open ‘File Explorer’ and take you to the directory that the XML file resides in. Look for a file named ‘Outlook.xml‘
Delete the XML file.
Then re-launch Outlook to check that it is working now.

That is how to fix the Outlook ‘Invalid XML’ error. I hope one of these methods worked for you so you can get back to your emails.

Category: Microsoft, Office, Windows 10 | LEAVE A COMMENT

1 January 2021

VMware PVSCSI on a new Windows install

If you haven’t already upgraded your Windows servers to Windows 2019, then you will probably be doing so soon enough. That means that it’s time to review the steps you take in building out your virtual machines (VMs). Are you running your VMs from a SAN? Then during this refresh, you should really take the time to consider using the VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) driver.

VMware Paravirtual (PVSCSI) adapters are high-performance storage adapters that can provide greater throughput and lower CPU utilization. They are best suited for environments where hardware or applications drive a very high amount of I/O throughput, such as SAN environments. PVSCSI adapters are not suited for DAS environments.“
VMware, https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1010398

When building new VMs there are four options you can choose from for their SCSI controller. The default LSI Logic SAS driver that is automatically selected for you will work just fine in most environments. That said, when you want to guarantee maximum performance from your VMs you will need to use the PVSCSI. Why wouldn’t you want to allow your VMs their max performance? It’s simple enough to do. Heck, do it and make a “golden image” template so you can easily redeploy it if you don’t want to repeat the steps on each VM everytime. It’s just a couple of clicks now for better performance later. Here we go…

Launch the vSphere Client and log in to an ESXi host or vCenter Server.
Select create a new virtual machine.
In the vSphere Client, right-click on the virtual machine and click Edit Settings.
Click the Hardware tab.
Click Add.
Select Hard Disk.
Click Next.
Choose any one of the available options.
Click Next.
Specify the options you require. Options vary depending on which type of disk you chose.
Choose a Virtual Device Node and specify whether you want to use Independent mode. For data disks, choose a Virtual Device Node between SCSI (1:0)to SCSI (3:15). For a boot disk, choose Virtual Device Node SCSI (0:0) or choose the Virtual Device Node that boots in the order you require.

Note: To set a disk to use Independent mode there must be no snapshots associated to the virtual disk, if there are existing snapshots commit them before changing the disk type.
Click Next.
Click Finish to complete the process and exit the Add Hardware wizard. A new disk and controller are created.
Select the newly created controller and click Change Type.
Click VMware Paravirtual and click OK.
Click OK to exit the Virtual Machine Properties dialog.
Power on the virtual machine.
Install VMware Tools. VMware Tools includes the PVSCSI driver.
If it is a new virtual disk, scan and format the hard disk within the guest operating system.

Category: ESXi, VMWare, Windows 10, Windows 2012/2012R2, Windows 2016, Windows 2019 | LEAVE A COMMENT

2 December 2020

DNS Tools

Here are a few handy sites to help with DNS-related things…

IP Chicken – Check your IP address
WhatsMyIP – Another check your IP address

DuckDNS – free dynamic DNS service

DNS Traveral Checker – detailed DNS propagation
WhatsMyDNS – Check your DNS propagation
DNSmap – Another global DNS propagation tool

MXToolbox – “swiss army knife” of DNS Tools
DNS Checker – Another DNS “swiss army knife”
ViewDNS – Yet another DNS “swiss army knife”
Google’s Dig – DNS record lookup tool

Dmarcian SPF – SPF record tools
SPF Query Tool – more SPF record tools
DMARC Analyzer SPF checker – even SPF record tools

SecurityTrails DNS history – View DNS history
CompleteDNS DNS history – Another DNS history site
DNSSpy DNS scan – Just another DNS history site

Category: DNS, Networking | LEAVE A COMMENT

17 November 2020

SCCM Device Collection from Excel

I got tired of googling this every time I make a new collection, so I figured it was time for my own post. I am now using SCCM for work, so I have had to learn a few new tricks to make life easier. One thing I’m doing often enough is creating a custom device collection of computers. The slow and tedious way to do this is to individually add each machine. Blah! What a waste of time. To make it go as fast as possible, I try to already have an excel list of the machine names I want to add to the collection.

In my excel file, my list of machine names are in column A. I’m going to be using column B for the values I’ll copy into SCCM. The formula that we’ll be using to convert the names into the format that SCCM wants is:

=char(34)&A2&char(34)&","

Lets break that down to see how it will convert the name into a format that can be used..

Char(34) is going to give us the quotation marks we want on either side of our computer name.
A2, in this instance, is the cell that contains one of my computer names. You will have to adjust this cell reference to fit your excel sheet.
At the very end of it, we add a comma.

Once we have that taken care of, we can drag the corner of the cell down to apply that same formula to the rest of our list.

Below is the basic query we will be using and adding our formatted list of names to.

select * from SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.Name in ( )

The end result, using the example list of computer names above, will look like this. The one thing to note is that you need to remove the very last comma from the list of computer names or you’ll get an error message when you try to save it.

select * from SMS_R_System where SMS_R_System.Name in ( "computer001", "computer002", "computer003", "computer004", "computer005", "computer006", "computer007", "computer008", "computer009" )

That is how you populate a SCCM device collection from an Excel list.

Category: Microsoft, SCCM | LEAVE A COMMENT

12 November 2020

Useful Software

Let us be honest, software is what ultimately drives IT. It is what allows us to perform duties and complete tasks. We use it everywhere from our smartphones, to our home PCs and office workstations. But there is a difference between good software, and useful software, as well as just plain bad software. I am fortunate in that between work and home, I use a lot of different programs.

I’m always on the lookout for new programs that will help me do my job better, whether it’s at home or in the office. Like most things in IT, it is an iterative approach as there is always something new.

That said… here are some programs and services that I find myself using often. These are my personal recommendations. As my opinion or tastes change, I’ll make sure to update this post.

This post was last updated: April 6, 2021

Brave Browser – https://brave.com /
This is a chrome based browser that is privacy focus. It’s taken all of the “nasty” user tracking features in Chrome and has stripped them out.

FastStone Capture – https://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm
This application makes taking screenshots a breeze. I use it a lot when creating documentation. It’s inexpensive, but it really makes the chore of documentation a lot easier in my opinion.

MS Office 365 – https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/
Love it or hate it, it is the gold standard of Office suites. It’s what 99% of people are using at home and work. If you have more than one person in your house, go for MS O365 Family, as it allows for 6 users on the plan for only $99/year. If you are a student, make sure to utilize your “free” Edu licensed copies of Office.

Yes, there are other free Office suites out there, like Google Apps or LibreOffice, which will work in a pinch – but why settle. Go with the gold standard and go with the software you know will work, go with O365.

NotePad++ – https://notepad-plus-plus.org/
This is my favorite text editor. If you haven’t tried it, what are you waiting for? It really is just the best multi-tab text editor out there.

VMware Workstation Player – https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player.html
This is a great, free, type two hypervisor. Do you want to run a VM on your workstation? This will do it! If you are really getting into virtualization (or use it a lot for work) look into purchasing (or having work purchase) VMware Workstation Pro, it’s $149. Having the Pro version unlocks a lot more features which the regular player doesn’t have. Also, take a look at the VMUG Advantage membership I mention below.

VMUG Advantage – https://www.vmug.com/home
If you work with virtualization at all, then you probably want to get yourself a VMUG Advantage membership. VMUG is VMware’s free User Group and its paid VMUG Advantage provides members exclusive development opportunities with 365-day access to VMware solutions, discounted training, certification opportunities, and more.

While it’s a little costly at $200/year, you get a lot back. Heck if you were to buy VMware Workstation Pro, that alone is worth $150, so for a little more, you can gain access to basically the entire VMware software library. How’s that for a LifeProTip. And with a bit of googling you could probably find yourself a discount code even.

7-zip – https://www.7-zip.org/
This is my go-to archiving software. It is free. It is open-source. You can use it on any computer. You never have to register it to use it. It works with just about any compression/archive file format. What else could you want!?!

VideoLAN – https://www.videolan.org/index.html
Also known as, VLC player. Need to play a media file? Well, you are in luck! VideoLAN will play it.
If it can’t play your media file, then you got bigger problems. I find that VideoLAN just works better than other media players. It’s also fairly lightweight, so it won’t slow down your system. It’s also available on every platform iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux.

PuTTY – https://www.putty.org/
This app is a bit dated. But it’s still a powerful little app that gets used daily by a lot of folks. It’ll open a terminal session (i.e. – SSH or Telnet) to the server or host or device you specify. I know that there are “newer” and more “robust” applications now that will let you do what PuTTY does… and someday I might swap one of them onto this list. But for the role PuTTY plays, it’d be hard to find a more widely used app among IT professionals.

WinSCP – https://winscp.net/
WinSCP is a great app that works as a FTP client, SFTP client, WebDAV client, SCP client & S3 client. Its mostly used for transferring files between your local and a remote machine, but it also has some capabilities in scripting and file management. I really like that it can share site settings with PuTTY, making it even easier to connect to my server and upload/download files.

Bitwarden– https://www.bitwarden.com/
I have two scary words for you – Password Management. Yes, it’s a scary subject. However, it’s one we need to talk about. With passwords needed everywhere and for everything, it’s important to keep track of what you are using on what site. Even more so, it’s important that you are not re-using the same username/password combinations on every site.

By using an application like Bitwarden, you can keep some of your sanity by letting it keep track of all of your passwords. There are plenty of other password managers out there… so I’m not saying that this one is the best. It’s just the one I am using. You just need to find the one that will meet your needs and utilize it.

Ninite – https://www.ninite.com/
This site is my goto when I’m setting up a ‘fresh’ Windows machine at home for myself or friends. To sum it up, it’s basically just a multi-installer. Tick the boxes to select all of the programs you want to install and then download just a single installer file. It’s fast and simple!

Trace32.exe – https://social.technet.microsoft.com/…
Trace32.exe, an executable found in System Center Configuration Manager 2007, can quickly open very large trace files and will automatically highlight lines with apparent errors. This tool will allow you to quickly open very large files and locate errors visually. It’s wonderful for log files!

Category: Software | LEAVE A COMMENT

28 May 2020

UDM FaceTime Issues

I have a habit, for better or worse, of spending [possibly too much] time on Reddit. It’s so easy to get lost scrolling through articles and comments on just about every topic.

I’ve recently started to follow the r/Ubiquiti sub-reddit and this was something that I found there. Some people report having issues using Apple’s FaceTime over their UDM based Unifi environment, whereas others seems to have no such issues. So take this suggestion at face value and use it if you need it…

Open your UDM’s controller in your browser.

Navigate to: Settings -> Wi-Fi -> Wi-Fi Networks -> Edit each of your network(s).

Scroll down to 802.11 RATE AND BEACON CONTROLS.

Set each network to use these settings:

Enable Override DTIM Period.
Set DTIM 2G Period to 3.
Set DTIM 5G Period to 3.
Save your changes.
Enable Auto Optimize Network.

Your iOS devices should now work and stay on 5G.

Category: Apple, Ubiquiti | 2 Comments

26 May 2020

DuckDNS on UDM

Updated on 4/09/2022: There was a change in the way the DuckDNS settings get entered in the UDM.

I have set up my Ubiquiti Dream Machine (UDM) and I am loving it. I’m diving into all of the settings that I can configure on my home network and one of the first things I’m setting up is Dynamic DNS (DDNS). This will allow me to reach my device/network remotely, regardless of the IP address that it has been assigned by my ISP.

The UDM can work with lots of different DDNS providers to accomplish this. Some DDNS services are free, whereas many are paid services. A quick google search will show you all the various sites that offer DDNS services. In this article, I am only going to cover how to use DuckDNS which is a free DDNS provider. Note: If you do use their service, I encourage you to support and donate to DuckDNS through any of the links at the bottom of their site.

Open your web browser and go to: https://www.duckdns.org/

Log into their site using your credentials from one of these sites: Twitter, GitHub, Reddit, or Google.

In the center of the page there is a spot to create a DuckDNS subdomain. This is where you will enter the unique name that you would like to use for your network, then click the green “add domain” button.

You will see your subdomain listed below.

In the upper part of the DuckDNS page, you should see a token listed.
Copy this token for later.

In your browser, open up your Unifi Contoller.

On your controller go to “Settings” -> “Advanced Features” -> “Advanced Gateway Settings” -> “Dynamic DNS”

Click on the button to “Create New Dynamic DNS”.
Enter the following settings:

interface: WAN
service: dyndns
hostname: <YourSubdomain>
username: nouser
password: nopassword
server: www.duckdns.org/update?domains=%h&token=<YourDuckDNStoken>

–For hostname, it is just going to be the subdomain name you created on DuckDNS. This field will not include the ‘.duckdns.org’ part at the end.
–For server, replace <YourDuckDNStoken> with your own token from your DuckDNS page.

Then click on “Done” button to save your settings.

Category: DNS, Ubiquiti | 4 Comments