Remote Control Options for Mac part I

In today's world having access to your files and systems from anywhere is almost a necessity. But we also need to maintain a high level of security. This isn't as easy as it sounds and I think it's a little harder for Mac users.

There are lots of ways to get control of your remote Mac. Some allow syncing of files and contacts and calendars while others are just for getting to the desktop, although once there, you might be able to transfer files back and forth.

Some of the major players are Back To My Mac, Logmein, TeamViewer, Share Tools, Various versions of VNC, DDNS, and using a VPN. Yes, I know that I haven't covered all of them, so don't send comments about your favorite unless it IS the answer come down from Heaven itself for this issue.

Back To My Mac (BTMM) is Apple's attempt to come up with some cool remote control software. Unfortunately it falls short. It was born as a part of the now defunct .MAC service which was reborn as MobileMe. So first off, you have to subscribe to the service at $99/year in order to get this feature. OK... so you sign up, install the software and sign in. Then you activate BTMM and get this little error message that... well it can't be turned on because the router you have doesn't have UPNP or NAT-PMP turned on... assuming that your router has this at all. And it gets even worse in a corporate environment behind who knows what equipment. In my case, my home router does support UPNP so I was able to get the service running. However, from my office I have been unsuccessful. And what happens when you're on the road.. how many hotspots will have one of those protocols turned on? Hmmm... not as useful as you originally thought is it? I think that BTMM has some great potential, but Apple needs to do something at making it more usable without sacrificing security.

While researching these BTMM issues I ran into a post from someone about software that would allow you to connect to your Mac remotely without needing to buy the MobileMe service. It's called TeamViewer (www.teamviewer.com). There's a paid version, but for home use it's free and the company just recently added a Mac client. I'd been looking for something like this for my company for another project and after testing it felt that it was the answer and the costs were very reasonable. So we purchased it. Of course I wanted to use it for my Mac as well. So, I installed it in my Mac and started testing. OK... the good news is you don't need UPNP or NAT-PMP... it just works. The bad news is that it works sort of :(.

First, unlike Logmein, TeamViewer doesn't run as a "service" so you have to log into the remote Mac while you're still there or have someone at the remote site do it for you and start the service up. OK... I guess I can deal with that, I'll just make it a login item. Well... that also only sort of works. When I log in, the application starts, but it fails to come up completely and doesn't connect to the company's servers in order to register with them. To solve this problem I've had to resort to starting it up by hand... which always works. So now I go to my office and do some work for awhile, but eventually I attempt to log into my Mac from my office Mac... no go...no connection. I've had someone at home watch and it appears that the two connect, but the final handshakes aren't made so no remote connection. I've had the person at the remote end stop and restart the application and then magically it works. I've had some other inconsistencies that I don't seem to find in the Windows version which runs very nicely as a service on the remote computer. Tech support has been responsive, but they've really been unable to solve these problems and I have a fairly vanilla setup on my remote Mac.