On a related but unrelated note, I've been an SBC DSL customer for several years now, paying extra for 5 static IP addresses, so I can get to my home machine from wherever. In practice, I find that I don't really use it that way very often, particularly because (for whatever reason) wake-on-LAN packets seem not to work. More on that in a minute. Meanwhile, because I was able to get those IP addresses to reverse-map to DNS names at Rice, it means that I can get into services like the ACM and IEEE library, for which Rice buys site licenses.

Right now, I'm getting 1.5Mb down and 128kb upstream bandwidth. SBC has a new promotion that could give me double that for a very reasonable price, but with dynamic IP. I can't justify the price that would give me extra bandwidth and let me keep my static IP addresses. I'm apparently very close to my CO, so I have a high chance of actually achieving that higher bandwidth (although I'd probably have to get a newer DSL modem to replace my ancient Alcatel box).

Would the extra bandwidth be nice? Occasionally yes, particularly for uploads, mostly no. It wouldn't be enough for X or NFS to become feasible, although VNC might start looking very attractive. (Mostly, I just work with local files and sync things with CVS over ssh.) Would the loss of the ACM and other libraries be a pain? I think there's an on-campus web proxy server that I could configure my browser to use for these things, so I could work around the problem. What about getting at the home machine from work? It's just not something I really ever need to do.

I could try to repair the wake-on-LAN issue to make my machine remotely wake-up-able again. The issue seems to have something to do with the NAT functionality of my Linksys WRT54G. If I make the internal and external IP addresses be the same, then wake-on-LAN starts working again, but I want to have potentially more than five devices at a time on the internal network. Right now, I'm running the Linksys with stock firmware, but maybe all of the free software add-ons would improve the situation.

Any thoughts on services like dyndns.org? Could a hacked Linksys box keep me accessible, even with the main machine asleep during the day?