REMOTE LOGIN

What system? Your home computer? Multiple computers on your home LAN? Or something different? What do you want to be able to do once you log into "your system?"

Typically, if you are just talking a single computer at home, I would port forward port 22 through your home router to the computer to which you wish to connect. Turn on remote login in system preferences in the home computer. This will give you "secure shell" command line access in Terminal.

If you want to be able to remotely mount the home computer on your desktop so that you can drag & drop files between them, then in the home computer, turn on AFP file sharing. Unless you have to access from a Windoze box, do not turn on smb. Then you add a "port tunneling" directive to your ssh login command so you tunnel this otherwise non-secure service through the encrypted secure shell tunnel. There are numerous posts in this forum that go into details about how to do that. If you have difficulty locating them, I or others can probably help you locate them.

If you want to do VNC, I'm not sure of all the nuances involved with Leopard in order to do that. In Tiger, you had to enable Apple Remote Desktop in Sys Prefs > Sharing > Services and also add a new "VNC" in Sys Prefs > Sharing > Firewall (VNC was a "canned" service that you enable it from a drop-down menu in "New" and it would quick-fill the necessary port data when you enabled it). Back over in ARD, there was an "Access Privileges" button that you had to go into to set up who could do what remotely via VNC, and enter the password that the VNC client would have to enter in order to gain access. But I'm not sure how to set that up in Leopard because they are doing the firewall and security and services a little different in Leopard and I don't have Leopard. I imagine the overall goals are the same, but the actual procedure to get there is a little different now. But you would still add additional port tunneling options in your ssh login command to tunnel the otherwise non-secure VNC traffic through a ssh tunnel as well. Again, there are numerous posts in this forum to tell how to do that. If you need help finding them, again, I or others could probably direct you to specific posts.

If you don't do Terminal, there are GUI front-ends to manage setting up tunnels for your otherwise non-secure services that you are wanting to access -- I think one is called ssh tunnel manager or something like that. Or you could buy two copies of VPN Tracker and set up a peer-to-peer connection. May still need to forward port 500 (I think it is, for VPN) through your home router.

Or are you wanting to set up your own webserver? Then enable web sharing in Sys Prefs Sharing, and forward port 80 through your router. Build your webpages in your Sites folder.

If you have a dynamic IP address assignment from your ISP and don't have your own domain name, look into something like DynDNS Updater or equivalent so you don't have to worry about what your dynamic IP address du jour is all the time. You can get your own free domain name and will always be resolveable to a numeric IP address, regardless of how frequently your ISP changes it on you.

Are these the sorts of things that you are wanting to be able to do, or .... ??

You're welcome, and thank you for not marking my post as even helpful.

There should be a port forwarding setup page in your router's configuration webpages, typically accessed by going to http://192.168.1.1 or similar (look in your System Preferences Network TCP/IP tab to find the "gateway" IP address, that's where you want to direct your web browser). Somewhere in the router configuration, there should be something to forward ports. Every router is different. Basically, you need to tell the router to forward all port 22 traffic to your home computer. You may need to specify your home computer's specific 192.168.x.x IP address as the target, or your router may be smart enough to associate your computer's name to the IP address and all you need to do is specify or select that. You may or may not need to disable DHCP and implement static IP on your home network, or restrict the DHCP address pool to a smaller number of addresses and assign the computer a static address outside the DHCP pool. Or DHCP may be okay -- it depends totally on the router. Pay a visit to http://portforward.com and see if they give you directions on how to forward ports through your particular make and model of modem/router. If they don't specifically address secure shell (ssh) just choose one and substitute port 22 for whatever port(s) they say. If your modem/router is not listed, your user's manual for your modem/router should tell you how to do that.

I would also recommend that if you have a laptop or second Mac available to you on your home network, make sure you can connect via ssh into, as a minimum, the command line interface whilst inside your home LAN, so if you have problems, you know where to start working (Sys Prefs Sharing or router config) to solve it. Then start adding these extra services -- can you do AFP or VNC directly inside your LAN? IF so, now can you tunnel them per the many instructions on other posts in this forum? Now can you do it from outside your router?

I would recommend starting a new discussion thread concerning this topic over in the Mail forum to address this problem.