It also won’t work if you have Starlink for your internet. I found this out recently when I went on a 3-week trip and wanted access to my home computers while traveling. Turns out nothing will get you through Starlink because of how it distributes IP addresses (I can’t remember the technical term for what Starlink uses). After a lot of hassling with different products, I finally got that answer on Screen’s website. Router company and others were all baffled as to why I couldn’t access my computers even with everything set up properly with appropriate holes open in my firewall.
Finally I found a product called Remote.It that works. It runs software on your local computer and lets you remote into it somehow. You can set up one device for free (otherwise it’s subscription). It’s a bit complicated, especially to launch VNC (screen sharing), but once set up it did work during my trip. I only needed to use it a few times. (One time it didn’t work, but that’s because my internet connection was too slow.)
Fortunately, my needs were modest – I only needed to occasionally grab a file from home that I didn’t have with me.
I know what you mean. But I can recommend from personal experience VNC Viewer from RealVNC. You can use their iOS version to discover and control any Mac on your local network using Bonjour without signing in to anything. I’ve used it for years.
Yup, and sadly CGNAT (“Carrier-Grade” NAT) is increasingly being imposed from without, for even more aggressive IPv4 address conservation by ISPs. These overlay/mesh VPNs are, sadly, really coming into their own now, for that reason. I recently moved to full-fibre (FTTH) Internet at home, and one of the reasons I ultimately decided to go for the top-tier package is because it didn’t use CGNAT. But the contract is clear that it might happen in the future, albeit with some notice, as has happened to speedy but lower tier services already. They do support IPv6 natively and I’m a big proponent of the next-generation Internet protocol, so colour me a hypocrite if it helps, but it turns out that, even with my expertise at avoiding the restrictions imposed by CGNAT (which is something that IPv6, with its vast address space, will never ever ever need), I’d still rather prefer to avoid CGNAT if possible in the much more common case that I’m stuck on an IPv4 only network. That this situation even arises at all is a sad indictment of our industry’s short-termism and reactionism, though; by now, IPv6 really should be widespread enough that this shouldn’t be a serious problem. But here we are. Tailscale is great; so is ZeroTier, or Cloudflare Tunnel. Or if you’ve got the chops, run a Virtual Private Server (VPS) and forward ports through that. Pick a poison and use it; it makes the pain easier to deal with.
Edit: and BTMM definitely could work in double-NAT situations, in some very specific cases and dependent on the behaviour of the NATs. But it was slow and flaky, and not robust. Certainly Apple could have improved things, but at that stage they clearly didn’t have their heart in it. Also, apologies that I seem to have hijacked this thread …
I have used the Mac version of VNC Viewer by RealVNC for years. It’s free for my personal use on a small number of computers, maybe three or five. I don’t see that free option now – all they discuss is a 14-day free trial. Maybe the free option becomes available after you sign up for the trial.
I use it for remote access to my mother-in-law’s MacBook Air to deal with email problems like “I forgot how to attach a document”.
If it’s just desktop screen sharing, there is always the option of Chrome Remote Desktop, of course. You need to have Chrome installed (but not running to receive remote connections). https://remotedesktop.google.com/
TeamViewer works, but I’m not madly in love with their software, or the way they try to upsell you. But it’s popular.
These applications focus on providing remote access. They aren’t general-purpose networking tools. But they might be what you need if you want to get into your computer from out-of-town.
How does it find the remote machine across the net? Or does it require configuring the router on the far end and figuring out the right IP? The Screens Connect app is supposed to configure all of that for you but despite being pretty network smart I’ve never been able to get it to work…I will give it nother shot next week when I’m back.
BTMM was a fantastic service for accessing your files remotely… when it worked.
I can’t tell you how many times I was out of the home office and I had to call my wife to go “wake my Mac” from Sleep Mode because despite having that “Wake for Network Services” box checked in the System Preferences, the computer would not wake when I tried to connect remotely. She would go into the office and jiggle the mouse until the Mac woke from sleep, then I could connect.
Even with “issues” like the one I mentioned, it was far-and-away better than anything else on the market (for the Mac) as far as consumer-level VPN services went. I would LOVE to see Apple bring it back to the Mac (happy accident pun there).
On macOS Apple has long since shipped the very barebones but viable Screen Sharing which lives somewhat hidden in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications, but can easily be launched by Spotlight or just using an alias/symlink.
AFAICT, the only missing piece is a counterpart app on iOS along with dynamic IP routing (and tunneling) à la BTMM through eg. iCloud.
Obviously, you could get a whole lot more professional and add lots of config choices and yada yada, but probably for most people such a simple barebones solution would be almost perfect. It seems to me most of it is already in place (assuming their old BTMM code base still contains useful chunks). Apple would really only have to supply few missing bits and pieces and this could be made to work just fine for a vast majority of those who seek to just monitor or control their other Apple gadget from afar (or just from another room).
Apple must know this. I wonder if perhaps Apple is worried about having to chase after all kinds of security issues if they’d provide something as turn-key as this built into every one of their devices. Obviously, this would be THE vector to attack Apple gadgets. Not to mention probably the greatest magnet for social engineering inflicted upon Apple users.
FWIW Screen Sharing has been “promoted” to the Utilities folder now in Sonoma, and has been fleshed out a wee bit.
Security? I dunno, as long as it’s protected by iCloud it shouldn’t be any more or less of a problem than other iCloud services. But you always take a risk when you make a service accessible across a network, and the remedy is to keep the software updated. Also, the attack surface could be reduced further if the software makes the connections, i.e. no open ports (I am not usually impressed by this argument, though it’s hard to argue with the illusion of comfort this brings).
Fun fact: Anydesk was founded in 2014 In Stuttgart, Germany by a team of developers who previously worked at Teamviewer. The two HQs are just 40 km from each other.
I use Jump Desktop when out and about or to aid my mother or others remotely, found it very reliable. But I go straight to Screen Sharing if I’m at home.
There is also Splashtop which is quite well-regarded, though AFAICS it’s still paid at the outset.
Unfortunately for my purposes, the key consideration is whether they stream audio back to the controller, and so far I haven’t found one that does this natively. I have yet to test audio streaming in the new Sonoma screen sharing, but my fear is that it’ll be restricted to use between Apple Silicon Macs. I use Sonobus and the Blackhole audio driver to work around this situation, but it’s clunky. Though that it works at all is awesome and makes me very happy.
So there are solutions. They just aren’t free from Apple, elegant, or universal to all network services (though VPN may be an added feature to the core functionality).
Wake-on-LAN services doesn’t mean that it will wake up for any network traffic. It will only wake when it receives a Magic packet, a packet that contains (anywhere in its payload) a specific data pattern (6 bytes of all-ones, then 16 repetitions of the computer’s MAC address).
Because it’s an unsolicited data packet and your Mac is typically asleep, you will probably require special gateway router configurations in order to get a magic packet sent from the Internet to arrive at your Mac, in order to wake it.
Whether or not you can set this up will depend greatly on your LAN, its router, and how configurable it may be.
Yep, in the Apple ecosystem this is the Bonjour Sleep Proxy. Here are some historical notes about it, for your delight and delictation. http://stuartcheshire.org/sleepproxy/