public web access

After having a discussion on the possibilty that the IP address from your ISP was unique or not I investigate this matter in more depth. And I must admit it's unique but taken from a dynamic pool in my case changed every 36h. If you don't have something to solve this, than the option of working remotely on the ngw via a web interface isn't that wonderfull at all. You must have something fix that always points to your address whatever it is at that moment. The solution is finding an instance which hold your IP address and link it to an URL. Also having a client running that at regular basis updates your IP address to that instance.

I took www.no-ip.com as the solution for my problem. Register with your email and fill in the free option of DNS host and off you go. I also downloaded the linux client package which comes with the source of the client. I compiled and linked it against the AVR32 libraries in the avr studio. I installed the new client as a daemon on the board. It works really great ! I tried it from work today and went smoothly.

Now I can be sure the ngw board is accessible from wherever I will be I just need an internet connection and a web browser but these are common things these days. The reason I wanted to investigate this matter is that I'm still thinking on how I'm going to build up the user interface. Now HTML becomes a good candidate to include in the list.

Next step is perhaps a smtp client. Not needed absolutely but still handy if you can send something out there when some events arise. This can of course also be logged and send by the cgi-bin if I like.

Still have to look into some security stuff also. I noticed that the root level directory of the web server isn't protected even if I put user/passw in the config file. And security you must have if you are open to accept connection on port 80 coming from the internet.