OK, so I have a setup that I think is fairly common. We have DSL at home, and attached to the DSL modem is a Linksys wireless router (model # BEFW11S4, and I've RdTFM). The home network consists of:

• giggles, an Ubuntu (Breezy Badger) linux machine hardwired to the router
• fray, in iMac running MacOS 10.4.something
• oldturtle, an ancient creaky Windows machine, running XP, and hosting an HP printer
• irving and farley, two iBooks, running MacOS 10.4.x and 10.3.x respectively.
• miscellaneous kitchen appliances, vacuum cleaners, and cats, who mostly ignore the network

Objective: I'd like to be able to ssh in to the machines (or a machine) on the internal home network, and (perhaps) host a modest website. It may be that the website yen can be satisfied by mac.com, and so that's not all that important for now.

The internal machines are running DHCP, getting mostly stable 192.168.*.* addys from the router as needed. The router in turn gets a DHCP IP addy from verizon that changes from time to time. I've registered a domain with dyndns.net (and should set up a cron job to keep it current, but haven't yet).

So far, I've found the port-forwarding thing on the linksys router, and set it up to forward port 22, which IANA assures me is used by ssh, to an internal addy which as of this morning was claimed by fray.

I've tried ssh-ing around the internal network, and that seems to work, once I figure out the IP addys du jour. I installed avahi on giggles, which helps with that.

Today's experiment, if you're still reading, was to ssh in from a machine at work. Result: timeout. Perhaps I should verify the dyndns addy is correct, but this is the same thing that's happened before.

Possible actions I've thought of so far:

• Figure out how to assign a static IP addy to at least the desktop machines, so the port forwarding thing can work reliably.
• Perhaps put either giggles or fray in the DMZ, relying on its internal firewalling instead of the router's.
• Ask husi. Hence this diary

Any advice?