[rocheb]

Hi

What I am trying to do (if possible) is be able to connect to another mac over the internet. I know some of you are thinking what an idiot I am for saying that last sentence -- just read on!

I would like to have the drive mount on my desktop just like using a local network, and browse files with the Finder (like using afp). The problem I am not sure how to work around is that we are both using airports and our IPs are not our actual IPs.

Is this possible?

Thanks

[Arkham_c]

Sure it's possible.

If you're using NAT on the base station, just port forward port 548 to your machine. Then have them connect to your machine in OSX by URL:


afp://ipaddress/

Make sure the IP is your real, external IP and not your NAT IP.

[car1son]

Please remember that once you set this up, your file-sharing port will be open to the internet, and not just to your friend's Mac. You have poked a hole in your firewall to enable this. The internet is a big place, and there are some unsavory people out there looking to exploit just such things. Use a good password on ALL your accounts. Monitor activity.

If you are connecting your Mac to the Airport Base Station via DHCP, the ABS can assign the Mac new IP addresses each time you connect (wake up, boot, come into range, etc), making setting the port mapping temporary to the current local network IP assignment. You can solve this by assigning the Mac an IP address manually IP.

You can get your real (internet-visible) IP address here: http://www.whatismyipaddress.com/ . The Airport Admin utility (v3.1) shows this a "Public (WAN) IP Address."

Unrelated to the Airport, if your internet service provider assigns your IP address dynamically (I.e., if you don't have a static IP address) you can visit http://www.dyndns.org/ to see how to avoid having to manually exchange IP addresses all the time.)

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by car1son:
Please remember that once you set this up, your file-sharing port will be open to the internet, and not just to your friend's Mac. You have poked a hole in your firewall to enable this. The internet is a big place, and there are some unsavory people out there looking to exploit just such things. Use a good password on ALL your accounts. Monitor activity.

If this is a concern for you, consider using an SSH tunnel and forwarding port 22 instead of forwarding Appletalk directly. This is very secure, although there is a slight performance penalty for encrypting all the traffic.