[SASAG] Controlling PCs and Macs remotely

[W.H. Jamison, Jr.]

As a favor to a friend I'm looking into what it will take to control her mother's Macintosh, running MacOS X and located in Pennsylvania from a Mac running Mac OS X here in Seattle. I've tested the combination of the Apple Remote Access and Chicken of the VNC and it works very well, on a LAN. Now my question is how do I set this up with two computers connected to Cable/DSL (she's not sure which her mother has, just that it's not dialup) that are using consumer grade gear (Netgear or Linksys routers/firewalls) which are probably using dynamic IPs assigned by the ISP. I realize that I'm being vague here, there's still a lot of information that I don't have myself but if anyone has set something similar up and can help me avoid any potential rocks and shoals (such as figuring out how you do this with any degree of security) I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks,

Jamie Jamison