Thank you Calvin and Gerhard for the suggestions. I had thought that I had set 
up a port forward in the router (which is of course NATed) so I could ssh 
into the computer, but something appears to have reset that, or maybe a new 
install changed the firewall. These things are rather hard to test from 
inside, unless one has a remote shell account to try them from.
But vnc is not an option when something has broken. Teamviewer could be 
interesting, but the linux version needs wine, and that is something we have 
no experience of either...

cheers

ant


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