This is how to set up Dynamic DNS with the no-ip.com. There is another well-known provider called dyndns.com but I happened to try no-ip.com first and was happy with it, so I can only speak for them. No-ip.com is free unless you want really fancy features (I believe the same is true for dyndns.com)

The first thing you should do is go to no-ip.com and open a free account. They will email you and make sure you're a real person, you will confirm that you are (if you are) and then you're ready to begin. Log into your account and make your screen look pretty much like the screenshots below. Yes, these were taken on a Fedora 9 system running KDE 4 so your system may look different, but you will quickly get the idea. Enjoy!

Don't have a GUI firewall or services app? Then try it the textual way...

And now you *may* be good to go. But if you're like a lot of people, you have a router in your home network, and this usually serves as a sort of firewall (whether you know it or not). By default, it is blocking traffic into your network for things requesting services like FTP or SSH or whatever. So you'll probably have to go into your router and configure it a bit.

The thing is, all routers tend to be different. But hopefully if you're thinking about SSH'ing home, you've already played around with your router. If not, now's a good time to learn...

You can also use this to bring your box online, which is a very risky venture and really shouldn't be done unless you either know what you are doing or have a dedicated line so if someone or something hacks you, your real network isn't totally screwed.

To make it happen, you'll need to install Apache, which I've never done and probably won't do for a long while. But Linux Reality covers this sort of thing, so go have a listen to it if you really want to venture into that stuff. At least this tutorial has given you a DNS name; to make a webserver out of it, all you really need to do is open the Web port, the famous port 80 or 8080 or 16162 or whatever you want to call it, and your box is on the interweb. Install Apache and put an index.html file in the proper directory, make sure that the group OTHERS has +x access to it, and everyone in the world will see your index.html when they go to your dns name.

What's really neat is forwarding your X session, done by typing in ssh -X username@hostname.domainname.com. Now you can launch applications that reside on your home computer and use them on another computer. When I did this with Firefox, not only were all of my bookmarks there and my history and everything, but it even asked me if I'd like to restore my previous session or start a new one. Oh, and I was doing it via X11 (on a Mac) at work. Don't you love it when people say that Free Software isn't innovative? The cool thing about it, too, is that it's all encrypted from start to finish, because it's all happening through an ssh tunnel.