me and a fellow ubuntu user are just finishing school and have a solid 5month break before i start uni and he goes travelling. we are interested in setting up servers (at least thats what they seem to me). i was wondering if, in my head i have this idea of having like a desktop or laptop etc set up in a basement somewhere constantly connected to the internet and either myself or my friend can access it anytime, anywhere by either a) booting up with a USB on a remote computer and connecting to it, or b) booting up with a usb, that then shows the hidden computers desktop GUI.

is this possible?

What do you mean by the "hidden computers desktop GUI"? A single *NIX machine can be hosting dozens of desktop GUIs at once. For the past 20 years I've been connecting remotely to *NIX machines and getting my desktop GUI on my local machine. The only requirement is that your computer allows remote X connections and has a globally accessible IP address.

by "hidden computer" i mean, like it will be physically stashed away somewhere. we have the security behind it all sussed out, were looking into "Tork" and "tor" servers. but the only real snag is the universal accessibility.

lay-mans terms; i want to sit down in any internet cafe in the world, connect to my physically hidden computer and access any and all of its files, and also save new files to it.

how is this done?

Well, preferably you should boot your local computer with your own software - you just can't trust public machines to be free of keyloggers and what-not.

As for running stuff remotely - you can simply use ssh, which can also forward the X data, or you can use a Virtual Private Network to accomplish the same thing.

The trick is that your machine needs a globally accessible IP. With many modems and ISPs, it is the DSL modem which will get the global IP - and it will probably be dynamic so you can bet it changes every few hours. To get over the changing, you can use the dyndns service. However, you need a wget script or such to regularly query your modem to discover the global address and publish any changes to dyndns. If the modem forwards ALL ssh traffic originating from the outside world to your computer on the internal network, then you can use ssh to connect. Same with VPN solutions - just route those types of packets to the relevant machine. Careful with the routing rules or you will find that no other internal computer can use ssh to the outside world.