Apple posts Back to My Mac information

@ midas360

that's about the most ignorant comment i've read so far. do you really think that .Mac for $99 a year ONLY gives you this feature. Additionally, this isn't Remote Desktop this is REMOTE FILE SHARING. Leopard will include Remote Desktop ****FREE****. So before you go and make dumb@ss comments like that, why don't you get your facts straight.

what does my $99 a year (or the way I look at it $8.25 a month) get me?
-10gb of online storage, 100gig of data throughput a month
-unlimited number of web sites hosting
-Domain Name hosting
-Back to My Mac (no fuss with setup Remote FILE SHARING)
-Web Gallery hosting for images and videos (again no fuss or setup, just one click)
-Syncing of all my Contacts, Bookmarks, Calendars, Entourage notes, eMail accounts to ALL my computers AND to my online .Mac Home Page so I can access it all when traveling when I decide to not take my laptop with me.
-an online Public folder that i can configure Usernames and Access privileges for so I can share files of any type with anyone.

i'm curious, what lame brain things in your life do you cuss over because you have to spend a whopping $8.25 each month for. Do you live in a cardboard box, is $8.25 a month really such a stretch for you.

stay off the comment board until you get an education please.

@Rlaan

That's great for you, but according to their product comparison page, the free version doesn't allow you to transfer files between computers. Kinda nowhere near the same functionality, eh?

https://secure.logmein.com/productcomparison.asp

Their "not-quite-free" offering is $69.99 per year, yet it still doesn't have anywhere near the feature set that .Mac has. No email, no 10gb iDisk, no syncing, etc.

Also, as reported by Gizmodo yesterday, Leopard will bring new features to .Mac: You can now have the dock and your Dashboard widgets synced across Macs, as long as you've got .Mac. All these little features really do make that $8.33 per month seem a whole lot more reasonable to me.

I use Logmein for this stuff, its simple and free AND cross platform. So the Work-PC users out there can also get to their Mac from work or any place with a browser (I used internet cafe's on my holidays). Check www.logmein.com. Although I'm sure Apple makes it more smooth looking. Logmein is a great solution!

I will probably use this to access my family's computer back at home, so I can send pictures back home quite easily. I bet mom will be surprised when she finds that I have dropped off more pictures for her to see of my college life!

I can't believe that only one person has hit on the key point here: as most of the western world sits behind NAT and firewalls and a vast proportion of Mac users aren't hugely technically savvy, this is RDC + tunnelling without having to configure either your router, firewall, or manage DynDNS.

If Apple's been smart about it, a Mac that's enabled for this will maintain an outbound connection to .Mac which will be then used to tunnel the traffic back the way (in other words, provided your Mac can open an OUTBOUND connection to .Mac on the right port, you'll be able to access it from anywhere). Of course, I've not seen or tried this feature yet, and Apple may not have gone down this route—but given the proliferation of badly-behaved, awkward and downright painful networking kit and configurations out there, it's really the only way to accomplish it reliably.

So yes, you could do this yourself. You could even employ reverse-tunnelling through some SSH magic and a shell script. Most people (even a lot of Mac gurus) wouldn't know where to start, though, but would be happy to pay for it if it means they don't have to drive over to $familymember's house, or gets them access to their iMac when they're at work.

Basically, it turns .Mac into “remote access to your Mac, plus some disk space, a mailbox, and syncing stuff”—companies sell remote access solutions like this on their own, and often more expensively.

"Back to Mac is just another feature in .Mac to entice customers to pay $100 or $180 per year."

I pay people about $100/yr to change the oil in my car even though I could do it for free.

So where's the problem with paying $100/yr for .Mac to get a product that doesn't require me to go to 20 different places to hack together similar functionality?

This also extends to the family pack, you have a family with 2 cars? $200/yr in oil changes. 2+ .Mac subscriptions = $180/yr

Giving my hard earned dollars to a grease monkey or a code monkey makes no difference to me, they both make my life easier.

It works by establishing a VPN tunnel from each of your Macs to the .Mac servers.

When you want to connect from Machine A to Machine B, the connection goes up to the server, then back down the VPN tunnel into B, and the same in reverse. This is how it handles NAT and firewall traversal, by initiating it from the remote machines, and having it always there.

It gives you not only remote screen access, but file access as well.

Furthermore, screen sharing is built into Leopard, regardless of .Mac, so those of you who want to set up SSH tunnels and use DynDNS, still can. When you open the Screen Sharing app in /System/Library/CoreServices, it asks you for a hostname/IP to connect to.

Remote Control without terminal

https://secure.logmein.com/products/mac/

"Which is different than ssh or vnc + dyndns how?"

I don't know that person, but this sounds pretty cool to an average computer user like me.

At half the current price, .Mac would be worth considering.