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• Virtual Machine or Dedicated Laptop
• Dynamic DNS Service (most Internet providers will not provide a static IP Address)

Virtual Machine

On your own desktop, I personally like VMWare Workstation (which I have a soft place in my heart for) and on the Mac I prefer Parallels. There is also some free alternatives,

• VMware Player - No snapshots.
• Sun/Oracle VirtualBox - Free for personal use.

Dynamic DNS

DynDNS.com - provides some free DNS. Also, I believe it allows you to use dynamic DNS with real Domains provided you purchase from them.

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