Day 4: Back to my Mac
I have two Macs at home. One is the family Mac Mini which utilizes my old LCD monitor, keyboard, and mouse from my Windows days. The family PC had conked out and I had purchased the Mac Mini instead of re-installing a fresh Windows OS because I was sick and tired of all the problems caused by the teens in the house downloading whatever program they would find and clicking on whatever banner they see. The second is my Mac Book Pro which I bring with me. This two Mac setup configuration also gave me the chance to try out Leopard’s Back to my Mac feature.
So I gave it a try. I logged on to my .Mac account on both Macs, setup the sharing preferences to ensure that screen sharing and file sharing are on. I am now in an internet cafe near my office with my MBP and my Mac Mini is on at home. Unfortunately, I could not see my Mac Mini in the Finder window. Sheesh.
I checked Apple’s docs. This one told me that, if I had a third party router, I had to “manually enable UPnP or NAT-PMP.” I checked out several threads in the Apple discussion forums, and many are complaining about their problems setting up B2MM. Check this and this. Well, guess this feature isn’t as intuitive as the rest of the features and will probably fail the “granny test.”
I also stumbled upon this site and their recommendation to not use Back to my Mac because of what it calls a security hole. Apparently, if you have two Leopard machines—the “server” machine, which you want to control; and the “client” machine, the one that will do the controlling—both signed on using the same .Mac account, you can control the “server” machine without the benefit of providing the “server” machine’s ID and password. I believe that to call this a security hole is an exagerration. I believe that this is how it supposed to be designed. I don’t want to remember another ID-password combination.
Anyway, I’ll give it a try again tomorrow.
November 07 2007 06:57 am | OS
