Filed under: Software, Friday Favorite
Friday Favorite: ShareTool
Another Friday Favorite, our weekly opportunity to get all sloppy over our most-loved applications.
If you have an always-on Mac at home, a decent upstream connection and another Mac anywhere outside of your home network, you might find ShareTool to be as useful as I do. It allows you -- with an amazing degree of simplicity -- to access your Bonjour services on a remote machine as if you were still within your home network. It does this over an SSH encrypted connection (and also automatically sets up a proxy for secure web-browsing over the tunnel). Yes, you can get some of these benefits with a simple SSH tunnel, or you could set up a VPN using HamachiX, but the simple fact that ShareTool "Just Works" makes it my favorite choice for everything from screen sharing to iTunes streaming.
I use ShareTool on a Mac Mini, with an Airport Extreme Base Station on a connection that gets about 800k average upload speed. iTunes streaming is flawless, and remote drive access is as good or better than just using SFTP. Setup is as simple as choosing a port (defaults to 22, the standard SSH port) to share on and hitting "Share" on your home Mac. After that, you can set it to start at login, and begin sharing on launch. Then, on your remote machine, you just need to enter an IP or domain and the port, and the rest is automatic. You can select which Bonjour services to enable or just go for broke and enable everything. I've got a static IP these days, but services like No-IP and DynDNS work great if you have a dynamic IP address. ShareTool can even handle updating the dynamic IP service for you, so you don't have to run any daemons.
ShareTool is provided by YazSoft, and a free trial is available for download on the main page. The pricing structure requires a license for every computer, and a pair of licenses costs $30USD (5 for $75USD). YazSoft provides free updates within a major version number (1.x customers get all 1.x updates for free). If you're looking for an easy way to keep your entire home network handy anywhere you go, it might be worth a try.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Hawkman said 6:11PM on 11-14-2008
I've been using SSH tunnels for some time, with the help of the sadly no-longer-maintained SSH Keychain in my menubar, mapping file sharing, screen sharing etc. This looks more convenient, but... why can't it just talk to an SSH server? I'd much rather use the built-in technologies that I'll trust to have security updates than another app I've got to run on my machines. Plus, you know, I'd feel dirty running another app - I want things to look like magic!
That said, this does look like a great way to set things up if you're not a technical dude/dudette.
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Justin M. said 6:37PM on 11-14-2008
@Hawkman: For a more straightforward SSH tunneling utility as you mention, you may want to check out our Meerkat application. It also support Bonjour sharing of the endpoints, but works with any SSH server on the other end.
That said, there's definitely something to be praised in ShareTool's simplicity and all-in-one-ness. It looks like a great app.
Hawkman said 6:56PM on 11-14-2008
Justin, good plug! That does look like what I'm after, personally.
J said 7:24PM on 11-14-2008
Guys, get a room please...
Michael Rose said 7:34PM on 11-14-2008
Brett also covered Meerkat here
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/06/02/meerkat-simplified-ssh-tunneling/
Flareman said 9:06PM on 11-14-2008
Oh no no no no no. Absolutely not; I steer clear of YazSoft after the Speed Download 5/MacHeist II fiasco and their obnoxious attitude towards customers.
It's much simpler to set up a solution using DynDNS, a utility like Port Map or Lighthouse (for automatic port forwarding) and then just activate the needed service. Meh, guess I'm allergic to YZS:/
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Cowicide said 9:49PM on 11-14-2008
WARNING. No-IP messed up the printer sharing (and caused issues with ARD on my LAN) on my Mac and their "support" is horrendous (downright obtuse, hostile and in denial). It was an arduous process to remove the changes to my system and get things working normal again and I'm still not sure I was able to find everything. I also had to reset my router as well to finally clear out the problems. No-IP was no help whatsoever with this process. They have a completely undocumented Applescript that will make changes on your system and they absolutely REFUSE to let anyone see the contents of the run-only script, so you could determine what was changed on your computer and how to revert it. I have no idea if they keep the contents secret for nefarious purposes or just pure ineptitude. Either way, after many years of using apps, services, etc. this company is by far one of the worst I've ever dealt with.
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Johan said 5:32PM on 11-15-2008
I love this app, for some reason I can't get my back to my mac to work on our network. But this works well. And it seems like it always works, I can't remember that I have had any trouble with it. Not like everyone I knows with btmm. Can strongly recommend it, absolutely worth it's price.
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Ryan said 6:21PM on 11-15-2008
I believe, though may be mistaken, that Hamachi (http://hamachix.spaceants.net/) does about the same things...also it's free.
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