Re: How to make my iSeries at home available to outside programmers

On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Richard wrote:
>
> At home I have a small network of PC's all connected and sharing a
> single cable modem.
> I have purchased an iSeries Model 270 running V5R1 and I have managed to
> connect it to my home Network.
> Now I would like to make my iSeries available to several programmers who
> work out of their homes.
>
> My question is - What is the easiest way for me to give access to my
> iSeries to people outside of my home network?

There's nothing iSeries-specific about the network setup.  You allow
people to access your iSeries in exactly the same way that you'd allow
someone to access your PC from the Internet.   The only real difference
is that the iSeries is designed to work with terminals, so you won't be
as limited in what you can do once you've connected.

The steps I'd follow would be:

     1) Find out if you have a static IP, or if you can get one for
          a reasonable price.   For any serious work, you're going to
          want a static IP.  (that means that your ISP doesn't ever
          assign you a different IP, you always have the same one)

     2) If you don't want or can't afford a static IP, set your LAN
          up with a dynamic dns service.  This would allow you to use
          DNS to look up your current IP, even if it has changed.
          One such service that I know of is www.dyndns.org, but there
          are thousands of them out there...

     3) You didn't mention how your LAN works...  but since you have
          multiple machines that are able to access the internet, you
          must either have   (1) multiple IP addresses being routed
          properly, (2) a NAT ("ip masquerading") server set up, or
          (3) some sort of proxy services.   Whichever method you use,
          you'll need to configure it to route incoming connections
          to your iSeries.

     4) Your iSeries will need to be configured for TCP/IP and will
          need the appropriate servers turned on.  (i.e. telnet, ftp,
          web... whatever services you plan to offer)

Once you've done that, people would be able to use a Telnet (or Telnet
5250 "TN5250") client to connect to your iSeries.   That would be very
easy.

Of course, the next thing you'll need to look at is security, which is a
much bigger and more complicated topic.

>
> Warning - I don't have a lot of experience in networking computers and
> using IP addresses.

Every time you do anything on the internet, you use an IP address.   You
may not understand how they work, but I'm pretty sure you've had
experience using them. :)


> Someone has told me that since my Network uses a Cable Modem I would
> have to get a ?Internet IP Address? and Point it to my Home Network.
> That did not mean much to me (Due to my lack of experience, I need more
> details then that)

Anytime you use the internet, in any way, you have to have an IP address.
It's not possible to access the Internet without one.  So, your statement
above does not make sense...   if you have internet access, you have an
IP address.

What you probably need to do is find out what it is :)

I'd love to give you more details on how to find this stuff out, and how
to set it up and test it, but you haven't told me anything about how your
network is configured, or even whether your iSeries is configured to use
it.

Maybe you need to start by reading up on how this stuff works?