ddclient woes

I previously setup automatic updates of my dyndns account. This had been working fine, until this morning when I got the following email from DynDNS:

Your account vwelch at DynDNS.com is due to expire in 5 days.

DynDNS.com expires accounts that have no activity during a 30 day period.

So I logged into my server and checked to see what was going on. First thing I notices is I had a lot of ddclient processes running, hung reading from whatismyip.org:

# ps auxwww | grep ddclient | wc
23 386 2486
# ps auxwww | grep ddclient
...
root 22048 0.0 0.1 6196 4184 ? SN Mar10 0:00 ddclient - read from whatismyip.org port 80
root 24041 0.0 0.1 6196 4224 ? SN Mar24 0:10 ddclient - read from whatismyip.org port 80
root 24791 0.0 0.1 6196 4180 ? SN Mar17 0:00 ddclient - read from whatismyip.org port 80
root 26332 0.0 0.1 6196 4224 ? SN Mar11 0:04 ddclient - reading from whatismyip.org port 80
root 28622 0.0 0.1 6196 4224 ? SN Mar25 0:09 ddclient - read from whatismyip.org port 80

My guess here is that at some point there was a network problem that gummed verything up. I started by killing off all of these hung processes:

# killall -9 ddclient
# ps auxwww | grep ddclient
root 15680 0.0 0.0 3236 796 pts/1 S+ 08:12 0:00 grep ddclient

Looking at the daily cron script I had previously written, use of the '-daemon' flag seems wrong since I'm running it regularly from cron. When the script runs, I want it to do its thing and exit. So I took the -daemon flag out, leaving /etc/cron.daily/ddclient looking as follows:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/ddclient -syslog

After this, I ran the script and turned my browser to DynDNS and saw that my Last Updated field was current.