Hi,

Here's my situation: I have a registered domain hosted by a commercial shell/webhosting service. This takes care of web and email. At home I'm running an ssh shell server for a few trusted friends to use. The problem is that I'm connected via cable modem to my ISP and my IP always changes so I have to inform the shell users about the change each time.

On the webhosting service the control panel provides the option of adding hosts and IPs to the zone so I added "blah.somedomain.here" as an A record and pointed it to my dynamic IP. When I tested it, the local machines can connect to the shell server ok using the newly-added hostname but users ssh-ing remotely get a "Connection Refused" error using the hostname. The logs show "...could not reverse map x.x.x.x" (the IP of the user trying to ssh in remotely). They can still ssh in using the IP though.

I'd really like to avoid using the free DNS services so if there's a way around this...

I'm running RH8 as a firewall/router doing IP masq for a home LAN composed mostly of Winx/2K/XP boxes

How is you ssh configured? Do you allow connections only from certain IPs?

no. the shell users have dynamic IPs too so i didn't implement any restriction of that sort

Try to get more info from the client side. Ask one of the people to run ssh with -v. It produces debug information that might be useful.