Adelphia at home and NAT...

[Scott I. Remick]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 18:42:39 -0500, Alex ander Sendzimir wrote:

> I chose Adelphia for my high speed internet service here in lovely 
> Vermont. 

Same here! By the way, let me point you to a site I just started,
http://www.vtbsd.net/ while we're at it. :) Feel free to stop by and hang
out sometime... would love to drum up a community.

> I would like to be able to ssh into my home machine from a remote 
> internet site or someone else's computer. I've tried a couple of things 
> I thought might work and no such lunch. I understand Adelphia might be 
> using NAT to route packets to my home machine. If this is true, does it 
> mean I'm can't ssh remotely? How, if possible, can I get through. There 
> is a company in Boston that advertises a package that does dynamic DNS 
> for home computers. I haven't looked into how it works, though. There's 
> gotta be a way!

What I did to simplify things was pick up a DSL/cable router. I can
recommend Netgear... I started with an RP614 but then upgraded recently to
a WGR614.

The router will receive a DHCP address from the cable modem. Your FreeBSD
system will then receive a different DHCP address from the router, by
default in the 192.168.0.nnn range. Netgear routers support interfacing
with dyndns.org so you don't have to worry about knowing what IP address
your router has this day. So you set up an account w/ dyndns (free) then
config the router appropriately.

All that's left is to open port 22 (or a different one if you want to use a
non-standard port) on the router to point to your FreeBSD box. I'd
recommend narrowing the DHCP range that the router picks from and leaving a
range for static assignment. Then have your FreeBSD system use a static IP.
That way you don't have to worry about the IP on the FreEBSD box
accidentally changing for whatever reason and you not being able to ssh in.

I've been doing this for a while now, and also tunnel VNC over the ssh
connection. Works great!