Back To My Mac (BTMM) Revisited

I always hate when I have to back track on something, but that's how we learn.

A couple of posts back I did a post on my experiences with trying to set up remote control access to my home Mac from my work Mac. At that time I said that I was unable to get BTMM to work from my office... Please read that post to see what issues I was having.

Well the other day we had in a consultant who's a big Apple user. We had a break in our work and were talking about our experiences with our Apple products. I mentioned to him the issues that I was having getting to my home iMac from work. He looked at me with a slightly puzzled expression and flipped up a window on his AirBook. He was attached to his Mac at home and doing screen sharing all while connected to my network. Wow!!!

How was he doing that? He confirmed what I had thought originally... that as long as the remote endpoint was correctly configured to work with BTMM and there were no errors at that end it should work. This does assume no block on your corporate firewall. Well, since his was working OK, that validated my thought on that and that my corporate network was not blocking the connection. Since I got no errors at the remote end when activating BTMM, that left only one possibility; my home router. I had checked to see if the model of router was on Apple's BTMM compatible router list and it appeared to be. However, when he was able to get to his, I knew that there was something amiss with my home router. The first thing that came to mind was that it's a Vonage router... yeah I know... that probably should have occurred to me ages ago. I looked on my shelf at work and found that I had a couple of other generic routers that were on the list.

I took one home, temporarily put it in line right after the cable modem, configured it and attached my Mac to it. I was able to test this config and BTMM now works pretty well.

I still need Vonage to run, so I hooked my Vonage router behind this one by connecting the Vonage router's WAN port to a LAN port on the new router and after a few minutes I could call out again. Problem solved!