remote firewall advice

[Robert Thorsby]

On 2003.02.04 14:44 Robert Edwards wrote:
> 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)?
<snip>

Try IPCop:
http://ipcop.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/twiki/view/IPCop/WebHome
which is a firewall/router based on RH7.x

IPCop runs on "10 Year Old Landfill" (tm) and has a Web interface, so 
can be "operated" and administered via a browser. It also has SSH. 
There are a few mini-HOWTOs on adding various bits and pieces to the 
HTML code -- so adding a button which, when pressed, emailed you the 
current dotted quad address should be pretty simple (you could even 
obviate the need for button-pressing by auto-implementing such a 
function as part of the ip-up script).

HTH,

Robert Thorsby
Thorsby & Thorsby