One of the new features of Mac OS 10.5, a.k.a. Leopard, is .Mac’s Back to My Mac, a way to connect to your computer at home remotely. Back to My Mac allows a user log into another Mac remotely via internet. This is a great feature but it is only available if you are a .Mac subscriber. However, the new iChat supports Screen Sharing, so the only thing to figure out is how to auto-accept a Screen Share invitation and how to do it securely. This quick tutorial will show you how set up iChat to do just that.
Requirements:
This set up requires that both computers run Leopard. If you don’t have it yet, here’s the Amazon link to buy it. It is well worth the price. You also need two separate iChat supported IM accounts, one for each computer. This could be AIM, .Mac or Jabber accounts.
Step 1: Limit Users
It is very important this step is not skipped. Not limiting the users will open up to anyone taking over your computer.
From your Mac at home, launch iChat and from the top menu select iChat > Preferences and from the Accounts tab select your account from the Accounts list on the left panel.
From the Security tab, select Allow Specific People and add the username of the ichat account you would like to allow to auto-connect.
Step 2: Set Up Auto Accept Screen Sharing
From the Alerts tab in the ‘iChat > Preferences’, select Audio Invitation from the Event pull down menu. Then check-mark Run AppleScript and select Auto Accept.applescript from the pulldown menu. You can close the Preferences window now.
Now, we’ll need to edit the Auto Accept script we selected in the previous step. Click on the desktop to go to the Finder and from a new Finder window, navigate to ‘Your Hard Disk/Library/Scripts/iChat/’. This is the folder that contains the iChat AppleScripts provided by Apple in Leopard. Double click the file Auto Accept.applescript to open in AppleScript Utility.
A Screen Sharing invitation is sent to iChat as an Audio chat with a Screen Sharing flag. We will need to locate the audio invitation section and comment out the screen sharing if statement by enclosing the lines with (* and *). See example bellow. Additions are marked in red.
on received audio invitation theText from theBuddy for theChat
(* if (screen sharing of theChat is none) then *)
accept theChat
(* end if *)
end received audio invitation
Save the document and quit AppleScript Utility.
Step 3: Set Home Computer To Stay Awake
Next, we need to set the home computer to stay stay awake, otherwise it will automatically go to sleep when not in use. From the top menu bar, select ‘Apple > System Preferences’ and click on the Energy Saver Preference Pane. From the Sleep tab, set the Computer sleep mode to never and check-mark the Put the hard disk to sleep option then quit System Preferences.
Step 4: Connect Remotely
Now we’re going to connect to our home Mac. From the other computer, add the username to the buddy list, select it and click the ‘Start Screen Sharing’ button on the bottom right of the buddy list window.
From the ‘Start Screen Sharing’ pull down menu, select ‘Ask to Share Username’s Screen…’ to begin the process.
iChat will ask permission on the Home account, but it will be automatically approved by our script there.
iChat will do it’s magic and your screen will shrink down to the corner as the remote Mac at home will go full screen.
Conclusion
I thought ‘Back to My Mac’ was going to be the .Mac feature that will make me renew my .Mac subscription, but the new iChat has proven more capable than the demo Steve made in his keynote.
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Oh, one more thing…. ;-) The mac.com IM accounts do use SSL for login (the AIM accounts do not), so if you’re worried about password sniffing on public networks, the mac.com accounts are safe.
Nice work on the Back to My Mac Work around. I have had success using the built in VNC feature on a local network. It is awesome to see how simple and easy it is to manage within a network using the built in VNC service and Screen Sharing. However I think this will be awesome for those who want to take it to the next level when away from home and need the Back to my Mac feature.
Don’t I have to pay for .mac to use ichat? If there is an alternative way to use ichat other than paying for a .mac account, please let me know.
Help, this is an awesome idea but I am confused by the implementation. The instructions make it look like you are using the same .Mac account on both ends of the chat… one on the home computer and one on the remote. How can you chat with yourself? Following your instruction, I went to the remote computer and I tried adding my own .Mac account to my buddy list and nothing happened. Am I supposed to be using two separate IM accounts or what?
Ok, I got this to work by using two accounts: my .Mac handle (argonaut) and my AIM handle (jyk1972). I set up argonaut to only allow connections with jyk1972. Then I left both running on the home computer.
From the remote computer, I logged in as jyk1972 and successfully initiated an automatic Screen Sharing session with argonaut. Wonderful!
But then I used the remote to log in as argonaut and requested Screen Sharing with jyk1972. This is the AIM account that has no restricted access list. I did not want this account to auto-accept requests… but it did!
When I looked at the Preferences pane, I realized that the Alerts tab applies to ALL IM accounts, not specific ones. This is a huge problem when using auto-accept screen sharing.
To work around it, I would have to log out of my public AIM account every time I stepped away from the computer. This doesn’t seem feasible.
Is there a solution to this that I’m overlooking?
Jason
“However, the new iChat supports Screen Sharing, so the only thing to figure out is how to auto-accept a Screen Share invitation and how to do it securely. ”
Chax can be used to do this. And you can set it up to only auto allow via certain users (i.e. yourself)…
http://www.ksuther.com/chax/
Is there a way to use this auto accept sript and be able to use your remote computer to wake your server computer from sleep to then screen share with it?
Great! Thanks for the help on getting this to work… I’d seen it work in the store where I bought my new iMac, but couldn’t figure out how to remotely log in… I’m going away this weekend and taking my Powerbook, but without the iMac at home automatically receiving the screen share I was stuffed! LoL
Thanks!
help I can’t get it to work.
How do I rename it “BAck to mac.” Is that an important step.
It also tells me that I have been logged on to to places and asks me to get off.
What is going on?
Long story short. My parents are old and need computer help often. I’m leaving the country next week for a few years. My dad has dial-up. I will have DSL where I’m going. We both have Leopard. Can I use Back to my Mac to help him since he has dial – up?
Thanks for help.