Home server on the internet

PLEASE NOTE IT IS EXTREMELY DANGEROUS TO HAVE YOUR HOME MACHINE CONNECTED AS A SERVER OVER THE INTERNET

Today I am going to explain how to connect a Linux box on a home network to the internet. I had to do this because I wanted to access my home Linux box from my office.

I have a x86 box running Fedora Core 5. This box is connected to a Netgear Router (MR814v2) directly via ethernet. The local IP address of this box on the network is 192.168.0.3 . In order to get this box accessible from the office, I first installed a telnet-server on the machine. Once the telnet daemon was installed I then started the telnet service using the command /etc/init.d/xinetd start.

The next step involved configuring the router. You need to log into the router by typing http://192.168.0.1 and then entering your administrator login and password. After this go to the Advanced -> Port Forwarding and select the telnet service and the IP address of the Linux box, in my case 192.168.0.3 and click add. This instructs the router to forward an telnet sessions to the Linux box.

Finally inorder to connect to the Linux box you need to telnet to the static IP assigned to your router and that's it. Your machine is now accessible anywhere from the world over the internet but at the same time it is very much prone to online attacks. I recommend using SSH instead of telnet however Netgear does not seem to support port forwarding for SSH. Need to dig further to be more secure.