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I am trying to use my Raspberry Pi as a toy webserver from my home. I do not have a static IP address, so I am using Hurricane Electric's DDNS service. I added an A record for my dynamic public IP, set up port forwarding through my DD-WRT sporting-router, replaced the nameservers on my GoDaddy account with the Hurricane Electric nameservers, etc, etc. Sometimes it works great, but it's not reliable. Occasionally I will get a DNS search failure and sometimes I will get redirected to a search suggestions webpage provided by my ISP. Can anyone help me figure out the missing piece?

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Have you confirmed that your Pi is updating the entry at Hurricane Electric? DDNS means the DNS is dymanic, but it still has to be updated by the client. Does the external IP of the Pi match what is at H. Electric? – MDMoore313 Feb 19 at 14:04
Right. My external IP address has not changed, so it still matches the one on file with Hurricane Electric. It's not like the outage is permanent - it's intermittent. I'll check and it will be down, and then two minutes later I'll check and it will be up. – Dan Forbes Feb 19 at 14:06

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Sounds like an issue w/ Hurricane Electric's service, or an issue with your ISP or Pi. One way to narrow it down is: When you can't connect using the fqdn, then try with the IP. If you can't connect using the IP, then either the Pi is choking or your ISP is. you could also put something else behind the same IP to determine if it's your ISP, a file server or another web server or anything really.

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Sound advice - thank you. – Dan Forbes Feb 19 at 16:13
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Check your public IP address and then try to ping it from external network (3g or 4G LTE) then see if you face same issue because that way you will know whether its ISP issue or issue with DDNS service. You need to test your network for few days then only you will know where problem is as intermittent type of issue needs time for diagnoses.

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I think this is excellent advice - thank you. – Dan Forbes Feb 19 at 16:12
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Your problem happened so recently, it may just be that some old cached information is still being served up by someone in the DNS chain. The linux command "dig your.domain.name" should tell you the name of the server that is giving you the bad data. You can also use "dig +trace your.domain.name" to see the chain of servers that is traversed to find your domain name.

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I'll check that out...thanks! – Dan Forbes Feb 24 at 14:42

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