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Using Back to My Mac

schinder (apparently) - 04:17am Dec 8, 2007 PST
via email

I had a chance to use Back to My Mac for real as I carried my Powerbook
with me while taking my daughter to her choir practice and then on to a
show at the library. Here's what I found during my brief
experimentation at two different WiFi spots.

1) I had hoped that whatever intercepted .local DNS would know about
Back to My Mac. It doesn't. "slogin G5.local" didn't work. Must be a
Bonjour thing.

2) My G5, however, showed up in the Finder sidebar, so I made a Share
Screen connection and then started looking around using netstat on both
ends. Back to My Mac is using VNC, and using IPv6 addresses. Once I
had the raw IPv6 address of the G5, I was able to do an ssh connection
and connect to the website on my G5 from the Powerbook using the IPv6
address. Since I archive both all of our photos and technical papers on
the website, that will come in handy. I've never been able to do it
before because incoming port 80 is blocked.

3) I couldn't figure out how to get Thunderbird to take a raw IPv6
address, but Apple Mail did, so I will have access to the mail archives
on my desktop while away. That will be useful. Since everything is
IMAP, I won't have any problem using both Mail and Thunderbird
simultaneously if I have to.

4) The IPv6 address of the G5 didn't change from one WiFi spot to
another, which makes me wonder if Apple isn't assigning semi-permanent
addresses to each machine that registers its Back to My Mac info at .Mac.

--
Paul Schinder
schinder

pobox.com

Mark as Read

johnbaxterlists (apparently) - Dec 9, 2007 11:19 am (#1 Total: 1)

via email

Posts: 601

Re: Using Back to My Mac

On Dec 8, 2007, at 3:17 AM, Paul Schinder wrote:

> Back to My Mac is using VNC, and using IPv6 addresses.

Hmmm...and I habitually turn off IPv6 when I commission a Mac. (That
goes back to either Panther or the prior cat--Panther, I think--where
I was having trouble with the "w" command in Terminal taking 30
seconds per line doing a failing DNS lookup to get the machine name
field.) Shutting off IPv6 took care of that. But now with Apple
using it (more), I suppose I'll have to turn it back on. Thanks.

> 4) The IPv6 address of the G5 didn't change from one WiFi spot to
> another, which makes me wonder if Apple isn't assigning semi-permanent
> addresses to each machine that registers its Back to My Mac info
> at .Mac.

The IPv6 address of your G5 shouldn't change as your roaming machine
moves around. Although your ISP may eventually give it a different
address, part of the idea of IPv6 is that it gives machines fixed
addresses. (Routing from the real IPv6 world still would not work
with the Apple-assigned IPv6 address--but at the moment there is magic
going on, as lots of the Internet infrastructure still doesn't work
with IPv6.)

Just as there were "plenty" of IPv4 addresses when it was developed
(leading to utter wastage of about a quarter of the address space),
there are "plenty" of IPv6 addresses, even given the equipment makers'
goal of every device everywhere having its own address. There are
indeed plenty of them for my lifetime (much more of which predates the
internet than lies ahead), anyhow.

Hint: Cisco loves the upcoming transition. We, on the other hand,
have new equipment to buy.

NAT, which has extended the lifetime of the cramped IPv4 address space
by a decade or so, will fade away. (But there is a huge downside to
that, as NAT has also been working as an effective firewall against
inbound packets--real firewalls will become much more important.)

--John

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