Cute Tech Tricks
posted in Hurray for Geekdom |I have a linux server at home. At the moment, it’s down, and I need a new hard drive; but I have a temporary replacement up and serving. It’s not really a server, just a place for me to work and see my files. And the guys at work have filtered out most of the world for connections to their development server. Sometimes I actually leave my cave in the basement and sally forth into the world, bearing my intrepid laptop, and since my own development work is done on this linux box, and since I can connect to work from the house, I need a way to connect back to it. It’s fairly straightforward, I forward a port from the firewall to the linux box, and then I can connect to our external IP address from out in the world, and I can work from there.
Yeah, I know, a VPN would be awesome, huh?
Anyway. Sometimes our external IP address changes (thanks Comcast) , and I may not notice from inside the house. So I have the linux box updating a file outside with our current address. If I can’t connect, I compare the IP address I’m connecting to with the address in that file, update the address I’m connecting to, and then I’m back in the game. Recently I updated this with a little perl script on the laptop that updates my hosts file with the ip address on the web-file. So I connect to a name, not an IP address, and it’s all automated, though there is a window where it might not work.
Some poeple would ask me why I don’t just sign up for one of the free dynamic dns services. And my answer is … “uhh, I dunno.”
