Remote access to home – part 2
Once you have a personalized host name registered with a dynamic DNS service, you’ve almost completed the task of setting up remote access to your home or office system. If you are trying to get access to a system in a corporate environment, you’ll likely run into issues of blocked ports and security concerns. Depending on how much beer you have to bribe your system administrator, you may decide to pursue your quest. Setting up remote access to your home system is far simpler and has the added advantage of maintaining your alcohol for yourself. That may come in handy at a later point, or right now…
To point the dynamic DNS service to your system, you’ll likely be doing two things: setting up the parameters for the dynamic DNS service on your home router, then applying some settings to expose certain services for you to use. If you have an older router that doesn’t support dynamic DNS services, upgrade the firmware to something better. It’s also free! There are free software utilities to assist, too. The router option simply makes the entire process more transparent and more reliable.
For the router setup, open a browser and enter the IP address of the router connecting you to the ether. If you are still using the standard admin user account with the default password, I urge you to change that before continuing. You were vulnerable to an attack before. Nothing you are doing from here on in makes the situation any better.
For the Netgear I have, the settings are logically grouped along the left-hand side of the router’s administration screen. The one’s we’re interested in are below the Advanced section.
Enable the router’s connection to the dynamic DNS service. At this point, you’ll see why the selection of DynDNS is one of the more suitable – it’s listed as a default selection. Enter the relevant account details you created for your dedicated host name, user name and password, then save.
That triggers the automatic update of the changing IP address assigned to the router by the service provider to the dynamic DNS service. Once active, you should be able to ping your host name. It may not work straight away. Allow some propagation to occur first. Try in a couple of hours to give the service a chance to get up to speed…
Since we’re connecting to Linux, we’ll enable the ftp and ssh services for now. Forget about telnet, ssh is far more secure. Ensure ssh is already running as a service on your system. By default, it should be enabled. Same for ftp. Remember that the dynamic DNS service knows only what IP address your router has, not the target system. That will be on your internal network and will have an IP address assigned to it. It’s a good idea for that to be fixed. Port forwarding is the process of permitting the incoming request for ssh or ftp, in this example, to find its way from the router to the target system. In port forwarding, select the desired services and enter the target IP address as it exists on your local network. For now, leave the default ports as suggested.
Save.
First test is to ping the host name registered with the dynamic DNS service. You can try the ping from the target machine using the fully qualified host name you registered: ping myfedora.homeserver.net, for example.
Almost ready to log in remotely…
