When you have a home server, you may not have the chance to be connected to the Internet using a static IP address, instead your IP address is a lease from your Internet Service Provider and may change every day depending on the setup.

So when you are in the outside world, it is not possible to guess the IP address of your computer, how could you connect to it if you wanted to?  The solution is to use a dynamic DNS forwarder like DynDNS.org.  Talking about DynDNS, many standard firmwares (Netgear, Linksys, etc.) support updating your IP when it changes.  Since I use Tomato firmware, I will explain how to configure it.

• First, you must register on DynDNS.org by creating an account.
• Then go into the “My Services / Host services” section of the site and add a new host name
• The free service offers you to choose any sub-domain name from their available list.
  (ex: myhostname.getmyip.com, myhostname.kick-ass.net)
• So you have to enter:
  • the name you want (myhostname)
  • the domain name (kick-ass.net)
  • if you want to enable wildcards
    (if enabled, anything.myhostname.kick-ass.net will be forwarded as well)
  • the service type: Host with IP address
  • leave the IP address, Tomato will update it automatically
  • leave the mail router checkbox unchecked

  
• create that host…

• Now you have to configure Tomato
• Navigate to the router’s web administration
• Open up the page under Basic / DDNS.
• Tomato offers to configure up to 2 host names, let’s fill the first one:
  • IP Address: Use WAN IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (recommended)
  • Service: DynDNS - Dynamic
  • Username: your account name
  • Password: your account password
  • host name: myhostname.kick-ass.net