remote firewall advice
Robert Edwards
Robert.Edwards at anu.edu.au
Tue Feb 4 14:44:33 EST 2003
My father-in-law is a farmer in the Riverina area of N.S.W. and uses a Windoze
98 box for various farmy stuff as well as e-mail and web-surfing. His TCP
stack has become corrupt on a number of occasions, resulting in the Bigpond
tech guys taking him through a remove and re-install cycle a couple of times.
This is, of course, a bit frustrating.
I am keen to set him up with a Linux firewall/dial-out server to protect his
little old Windoze 98 box from the big bad Internet.
What I would really like is some way for him to press a button (the machine
would have no keyboard) to initiate a dial-out connection. Once connected, I
would like the machine to establish a connection back to me (I wouldn't be
able to connect to it as I wouldn't know it's IP address and it may be behind
a NAT router). Maybe a PPP over SSH connection or something so that I can log
in from where I am and nurgle his configuration files or whatever.
Has anyone done anything like this - set up a remote dial-out machine that can
be administered remotely? Anyone have any links to similar projects? Anyone
got any advice on how to implement a button to establish the dial-out
connection (he can't leave the machine permanently online for various
reasons, including financial). Am I thinking in the right direction, or is
there an easier way (I don't play with dial-out much at all, so this is all a
bit new for me)?
Another thought I had, although requiring a new modem, would be to get a modem
with caller ID. Then I could set it up so that if I rang it from a known
phone number, it would then respond by dialing out to the ISP and
establishing the connection to allow be to connect in. But this may be even
more problematic.
Thanks for any ideas.
Cheers,
Bob Edwards.
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