remote firewall advice

[Alex Satrapa]

On Tuesday, February 4, 2003, at 05:25 , Robert Edwards wrote:

> 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.

I use mgetty's "ringback" function - this isn't dialback.  The way it 
works is the modem is usually set to not answer.  When mgetty sees an 
incoming call, it goes into "ringback" mode - it will wait 20 seconds 
from the last ring, and if another call occurs in that time, it will 
answer.

So from your end, if you want to frob the config files without getting a 
human at the other end to do stuff, you just pick up your phone, ring 
the number, wait for one ring then hang up.  10 seconds later, you tell 
PPP to connect with his number.  His machine answers, and you have a 
connection.

But the question I ask is - are you really that likely to be trying to 
twiddle the config when your father isn't around?  The occasions that I 
can think of that you'd need to mess with stuff are:
  - upgrading the software on the Linux box
  - modifying dial up numbers for Bigpong (or whatever ISP)
  - reconfiguring IP firewalling rules

For all three of those, you'd want to have a human nearby to help out in 
case you break things.  And you'd probably want the poor sucker sitting 
knowing that you're messing with things, so when get goes to dial up 
next time and the thing behaves differently, he knows it's supposed to ;)

Alex
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