How to connect to my mac at home when I'm on the road?

The last few times I've traveled, I've wound up bring both my personal (mac) and work (xp) laptops. I'd like to avoid carrying two machines by leaving the mac at home and remoting in if need be.

I'd rather not pay for mobileme (which apparently makes this relatively easy), but ssh access is fine. Also, I'd like to be able to put the machine to sleep, and wake it when I want to connect.

When I've tried to do this sort of thing in the past, I've run into problems with getting through my ISP to my machine, but perhaps I'm just not doing it correctly.

sprugman

Posted 2009-12-23T01:56:40.070

Reputation: 233

What do you mean by difficulty getting through the ISP: IP change? port forwarding? something else? – Jeremy L – 2009-12-23T02:32:17.317

It's been a while, but IIRC, I was using DynDNS, set-up port-forwarding, thought I had the correct IP address, and still couldn't get through. Don't really know what the problem was. – sprugman – 2009-12-23T15:19:59.023

Answers

Some notes from times I've tried this:

You may need to deal with DNS issues if you don't have a static ip. You can use DynDNS or a similar service to set up an address you can dial home to.
If you are behind a hardware router with multiple computers, you will probably need to set up port-forwarding to get ssh to work straightforwardly.
And the big problem last: You would need to mess with battery/power settings to control sleeping the drive. However, note this from Mac's help documentation on the "Wake for Ethernet network administrator access" option:

Wake for Ethernet network administrator access: Select this option if you want an administrator to be able to wake the computer from over the network. (The “ssh” or “telnet” Terminal commands will not wake the computer even when this option is enabled.)

Telemachus

Posted 2009-12-23T01:56:40.070

Reputation: 5 695

Doing wake-on-LAN over the internet has never worked for me. Some routers though have WOL built in, i.e. you can send a WOL packet from the router's administration page, which can usually be set to be accessible from the internet. If you choose to do that, you'll want to make sure it's not on port 80 probably. The tomato firmware has this, and I think DD-WRT may, too. Not sure about regular consumer router default firmware though. – nhinkle – 2010-02-26T06:34:05.577

With TeamViewer you can remotely control any computer as if you were sitting right in front of it - even through firewalls.

free for personal use.

Version 4 works for Mac OS X

Molly7244

Posted 2009-12-23T01:56:40.070

Reputation:

Logmein also seems to be a decent, free option. And of course there's goToMyPC (which isn't free after the trial period).

sprugman

Posted 2009-12-23T01:56:40.070

Reputation: 233

I've used both, and honestly, they're both great. I'd say it's basically up to what the user would prefer. – nhinkle – 2010-02-26T06:31:58.800

i wouldn't consider LogMeIn anywhere near 'decent' and the way it screws up the host video drivers is ridiculous. LogMeIn is no match for Teamviewer which is running circles around Logmein in terms of speed and ease-of-use. – None – 2009-12-23T02:33:17.220

Huh. I tried to do a comparative search, and LogMeIn seemed to have slightly more juju than TeamViewer... – sprugman – 2009-12-23T15:18:37.557

Don't forget MobileMe. While it's not free, you can usually purchase the subscription for around $60 USD. And once both systems are configured to use MobileMe, you can use the built-in VNC/Connect to computer option from Mac OS X to connect to the other computer.

(MobileMe's "Back to My Computer" feature, uses a reverse proxy. It connects to Apple's servers on a regular basis to see if there is a waiting inbound connection from your other client).

additional benefits...

1) Your router configuration is irrelevant, since both computers are making outbound connections out to a secure server... 2) You get a free email, web site, etc (yes, pretty much unnecessary, but...) 3) You can synchronize your contacts (Address book), web bookmarks, email accounts, between both computers 4) FREE 30 or 60 day trial... (I forget). Just go to www.me.com and sign up. 5) Your using built-in tools in the Mac OS, so they will always be up to date...

Benjamin Schollnick

Posted 2009-12-23T01:56:40.070

Reputation: 4 313