I'll be away from home for the following weeks (and perhaps months). I want to use the Internet with confidence, so I have setup an old computer with SSH and I'll be tunneling to that (from a netbook).

I haven't remote-managed a computer for such a long time and I want to be sure that even if I do a mistake remotely, I can bring the computer back to a good known state.

The home computer will reside inside my aunt's house and she knows very few about computers.

I've been thinking about burning a bootable DVD containing a tarball of a freshly configured Slackware. If I mess up, I can phone my aunt and tell her to simply put the DVD inside the drive and press ctrl-alt-del. The DVD boots, un-tars (the fresh Slackware), ejects the CD-tray, waits for her to press Enter, closes the tray, and finaly reboots to my good old known fresh Slackware.

How can I create such a DVD?

Search keywords, guides, and HOWTOs are much welcome

Oh ye of little faith! A couple of months for a working Slack system is a doddle.
Setup SSH using key authentication and do not allow root logins. If you do not fiddle, there will not be a problem.
If you really want to be paranoid, clone your Slackware setup to another disk partition and tell your aunt to boot from the backup partition after Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Short of catastrophic hardware failure, I am 99.9999% confident all will be OK.

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Even if it's an overkill, it's still a nice exercise, don't you think?

Take a look at clonezilla.

ibid

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I know it's been almost two months, but I just wanted to say thanks for your suggestions

I have a suggestion, taken from a very nice Brazilian forum. It is written in Portuguese, but you can figure out the meaning. If you need any help with the translation, let me know. Look at this link. The first instructions will generate an ISO (with system rescue CD) on a separate EXT2 partition to be burnt onto a DVD. The second part tells you how to make a hidden partition to automatically restore your system.

http://www.guiadohardware.net/dicas/systemrescuecd.html

that would be nice a restore partion its just what i need.
i have a clone of my xp servicepartiton on a cd there must be a way to make an self extracting iso of slackware,im thinkin unetbooting frugal install,damn i even have a restore button im gonna follow this tread closely.

g4u TODO list includes back up whole hard disk to dvd. Unfortunately the last update took 3 years (that was last year).

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/