Another Chapter in BTMM

Well, this time I have some good news to report... I think :)

As I have chronicled here, Back To My Mac (BTMM) has been a very frustrating thing. I can get it to work between the one iMac I have at home on one circuit and the other one on another circuit, but that's pretty much it. We had a consultant in here about a year ago who was able to connect to his home iMac without issue through our network and he was using the same router at the home end that I was. But I could never get it to work. So I messed and messed with it, but basically gave up.

So I was having other issues with the router that I had chosen for my home router and I decided to replace it with an Apple Airport Extreme wireless router. I thought that this might even help some of my BTMM issues. So, after getting it running I attempted to do a BTMM from the one iMac to this one and it worked just fine. I didn't even try from my work Mac simply because I'd never been able to get it to work no matter what.

A week goes by and I need the file sharing capability of BTMM at home from the one iMac to the other so I fire up everything and am surprised that I can not get a connection... what's the deal? BTMM will not start without an error that it can't contact the service. I rebooted everything including the router and cable modem and could not get a connection. I opened a call with the Apple MobileMe tech support and they had me do much troubleshooting including hooking my iMac directly to the cable modem. When I did that it worked just fine and when I hooked the router back in it failed. So, it appears that there is an issue with the Airport. However I'm not buying that so I start a new thread on the Apple community forums. There is a guy there who really knows his stuff about BTMM, even more so than the Apple tech guys. He has me run some terminal commands and it appears that the DNS lookup is failing. His usual suggestion to folks is to replace the DNS entries that default to your systems with the ones from Open DNS (www.opendns.com). But I already had those in there so he had me remove them and let my ISP default back to the ones they want to use and lo and behold BTMM started working again. We both found this odd as I can't imagine my ISP would care whose DNS I used. So after I got it working I added back in one of the OpenDNS DNS settings and it still started up and worked OK. Then I added back in the other one and it still started up and worked OK. So I rebooted everything and checked to make sure that the DNS settings stayed and BTMM still starts without error and I can connect from my other iMac. I am back to the same settings I had before having the trouble. Weird... so I guess if I see it again, I'll mess with the DNS settings to see if that fixes anything.

Now the good news... I was sitting at my work Mac the other day and, as usual, I can see my home iMac in Finder, but I've never been able to connect. So I clicked on it to connect and was surprised when it prompted me for credentials and when I entered them I got connected to it. And the screen sharing is working as well. Great news... wish I knew why... but I'm good with this.