Back to My Mac not working? Apple knows.

Back to My Mac worked great... until my trial version of .Mac expired. I forked over the $99 ONLY to get BTMM to work and, lo and behold, it stopped working! No changes to my setup or router, it just doesn't work anymore.

A new Airport Extreme serves as my router and the two machines I'm trying to "Back to My Mac" are both running Leopard 10.5.1. My "back home" machine is set to never go to sleep. As in the case of others posting here, Back to My Mac works perfectly when I'm in my Atlanta house but once I leave, no way. I'm sitting in Charleston this morning after trying to configure everything on both machines just as Apple and on-line posters have recommended and my Finder STILL doesn't include my back-in-Atlanta machine. Clearly this feature is not ready for prime time and that's regrettable. But it is astonishing me to that some posters are disdainful of those of us unable to get this thing to work. BTMM is not being promoted as some piece of exotica that requires extraordinary knowledge of arcane networking procedures. While I agree that it's unfortunate that Apple perhaps prematurely released and touted this service, I, for one, am willing to cut them a little slack since 1) BTMM would be a terrific feature to have and 2) this is apparently pretty complicated stuff, given the variety of configurations in the field. Hope the fix comes soon, though.

Back to My Mac didn't work when I did my first upgrade install (which had loads of other problems).

Once I did a clean install it worked right out of the gate. Its worked with both an Airport Extreme and and Airport Express on the home end from a variety of locations (work, friends houses, a public hotspot).

I forgot to mention that Leopard is so great... you can just type in the Connect to Server field vnc://your.dyndns.org and boom Screen Sharing comes up automatically.

I don't really think the problem is Leopard, but rather Apple expecting users to configure their networks and routers at home to properly do this.

Got my Linksys router forwarding all ports to my G5 at home, and it also updates my dyndns so I don't have to worry about an IP address changing on me. I don't even have Leopard running on my G5, I have Tiger with Apple Remote Desktop. Works like a charm. Someone mentioned SSH tunneling also, a great approach if you want to have your Home machine's iTunes Library come up in any remote machine's Shared Libraries.

I hate to say it, but I think this time Apple has relied on the "Macs are easy to use" factor a little too much this time.

Yes, finally Apply is aware of the problem or at least admit to it. One of the major feature of Leopard/.mac, does not work. BTMM, only work in your home network, and what is the purpose of that? And, it only works in a few rare set-up when away from your home-network. I was online with Apple support for a couple of hours about this, but first guy there did not know anything about Mac set-up at all, second guy said this works great, but not outside your home-network???!!!!>>>??? Wow!!! What's the purpose of having this to work at home? Apple, is always about easy set-up, no worries, be happy, not anything close to a PC. This is how it has been since I bought my first Mac almost 20 years ago. This time, in order to get it to work as it should, a very complicated set-up is required and maybe and, occasionally, you can get it to work the way it should. I am an update-freak, meaning I update anything when there is an update, not like my PC-friend, who will stick to XP until Vista have been put and running for at least 2 years. I wish I had the same attitude and sticked with Tiger. Too many problems with Leopard. Leopard was never really released with an up and running Gold Master. Leopard was released way too early. BTMM is only one of a whole list of snags. I have Vista installed on my iMac 24 (home computer) as part of BoothCamp. This Vista is fast and more reliable than my MAC on my MAC!!!!!!

While I'm reluctant to go too far off topic, Daniel's post struck home. I've an aluminum iMac and when I upgraded to Leopard, the Firewire got messed up. After considerable frustration, here's what I've learned. Tiger- no problems. Leopard- if there was no FW400 device attached an on at boot, the FW800 controller takes over and FW400 is dead. If there WAS a FW400 device attached and on at boot, then no worries. Sad but true.

And on topic, I've never gotten BTMM to work outside of my own home network. I'm developing a love/hate relationship with Leopard.

I use DD-WRT on my home DSL router and it works great since install (10.5.0)! I had some flaky behavior at first when using EarthLink's DNS servers (they sadly use poisoned Barefruit DNS servers) but when I used the non-tainted servers, it starting worked fine and has since.

I can't get to the office from home tho, but I am quite sure they don't do and will never do UPNP :^) so I don't expect that to ever work.

Back to my Mac is odd. I have my iMac G5 and my Macbook both on 10.5.1 right next to each other and both on the same local network, both recognized by each other, and both can exchange files back and forth. BUT only the G5 can see the screen of the Macbook (without resorting to iChat screen sharing) - the Macbook cannot see the G5's screen. In fact, the Screen Sharing application quits almost right away when trying to see the G5's screen. I finally got them playing nice by launching OSXVNC. I'm guessing that Back to My Mac is really just a stealth VNC server with slick file exhange.

Note: I use Netgear Wireless G routers with UPNP on both active. I have NEVER been able to see either computer over the internet.

What Apple needs to do is tell what ports to forward. I did not buy Leopard to also have to buy Apple products like Airport routers just to use the features I bought. More people need to complain. This violates FTC and anti-trust laws. I'm a lawyer. The OS should work without the need to buy Apple's routers much like most printers should work with most computers. The world would cry bloody murder if MS Vista only worked with HP printers.

What's wrong with VNC? A little DynDNS action, and you're all set!
BackToMyMac is VNC based right? Why does apple restrict it to only mac to mac then I wonder..?
I only have one mac so I can't even use the feature, but VNC works fine for me.