in reply to secure remote command

I would suggest that the first thing you do is to look at running an "on-demand" ppp connection. This will do the dialing for you whenever a machine on the internal network has a valid connection to the outside world. You can define your firewall rules to select which machines are allowed the connect (and even at what times).

By running your firewall machine as a gateway (i.e. with Windows clients you want the firewall to be a DHCP server) you can minimise the fiddling you need to do on the clients.

There are lots of books on doing this type of thing, and the HOWTOs are also worth reading.

If your ISP supports it you can set up your firewall machine as a DNS, mail and news server as well (in fact you can spend hours messing with it).

If you want some level of control from the clients you could, for example, set up a web server (only for the internal network of course) that uses CGI (in Perl naturally) to control the PPP connection.

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Re: Re: secure remote command
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Apr 17, 2003 at 12:43 UTC
    You mean makes a valid request to the outside world. How can you have a connection if you're not connected ;)

    MJD says you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!
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[reply]

      The way that I run dial-on-demand ppp it appears from the clients to be a permanent connection. The ppp daemon takes care of dialing when someone needs a connection and dropping the line when it is not busy, but this is transparent to the machines that use the gateway.

      The distinction I was attempting to draw was that my firewall rules only masquerades the current "valid" systems to the outside world (which ones are valid is controlled by a Perl script naturally).

[reply]

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