There’s no place like home…

How often have you found yourself on your laptop, (or your Mac at work for those of you lucky enough to be given a Mac) wishing you had full access to your home network? For me, it’s almost all the time…….sitting at a client, looking for a word document, and realizing it is on the Mac at home. Most of us have heard that annoying commercial on XM, FM, or whatever other media that have been saturated about the same scenario, claim to give you full access to your work computer through a virtual desktop, Go To My PC. That is great if you need remote desktop, but what if you want the actual file or, what if you use a Mac? For me, I like to have the file on my local computer.

With Leopard, Apple added this great feature called Back To My Mac. This wonderful little application allows you to have full access to your Macs at home from anywhere on the Internet. If you have a dot Mac account and Leopard, you are all set. The setup is super simple; you do not need to make major edits to your router and better yet, it’s secure.After you have everything set up, all of your Macs show up in finder as if you are on the same network. It looks and acts as if you are at home. When you click on the Mac, you have an option to either view your hard drive, or have remote access to the desktop.

By going into the drives, you have full access to all the files; copy, cut, and open all work. Depending on the Internet connection you are using, the speeds are not bad. I use a Verizon EDVO card and can move a 1 MB file in a matter of seconds. The one down side I found, it does not show mounted volumes, such as USB, Firewire, or networked drives. So if you keep your data on a USB drive your out of luck. I am trying to find a work around, if any of you know of one, please post it in the comments section.

The “share screen” is also a nice little feature. Just by clicking on the “share screen” button, you instantly have full access to your desktop. Nothing too special here, it’s just like RDP for Windows users and VNC for the Linux guys. However, it is nice in the case you have a file on your FireWire drive, you can drag it to your desktop and viola, you have access to the file from your laptop.

I discovered this little gem just today. Thus the reason, I am blogging about BTMM. If you open terminal and select Shell, a new option called “New Remote Connection” appears. THis allows you to create a SSH tunnel to any of your Macs. I have a few command line tools installed on my Mac at home for troubleshooting network issues. So from anywhere I can SSH into any of my Macs, and run those command line tools. This feature really was a nice to find, as Verizon blocks the ports needed for SSH into my home network, so instead of doing port shifting, I just connect through BTMM.

All in all, the new “Back To My Mac” is a very nice addition to an already wonderful Mac experience.. Its a perfect solution to have your home network with you, everywhere you go. As i find new little hidden features, i will post them in the comments section.