remote firewall advice

[Robert Edwards]

Thanks for all the responses so far. Looks like quite a few of us have come up 
against similar problems.

The dynamic DNS solution looks good, provided that Bigpond use publicly 
routable IP addresses for their dial-up customers - does anyone _know_ if 
this is the case, or are they likely to be using NAT?

As for dial-on-demand etc. I would need to use this anyway, but I don't want 
my father-in-law to have to turn on his Win98 box in order to get the Linux 
firewall machine to contact me.

However, I have had another idea, based on some of the responses. I want to 
have the Linux box up as much of the time as possible, for various reasons, 
so I don't want it powered up and down each time the Internet is being used. 
However, I could have the (external) modem powered up and down each time the 
Internet is to be used. Has anyone tried something like this? Maybe poll the 
modem serial port, or have some utility that detects change of status of the 
Data Set Ready (DSR) line or similar and then start the dial-out process up? 
Would this be likely to work? Any tips on how to implement it?

The reason I want to use Linux instead of a dedicated commercially available 
router like a Netgear or Linksys or similar is that I would also like it to 
do some web caching, junkbusting and possibly some e-mail virus scanning (all 
future projects at this stage). Plus, of course, I want to be able to log in 
remotely using SSH.

Thanks again for the tips so far.

Bob Edwards.