Simplified remote access on Leopard
2008-04-02 08:55:57
My friend Russ found this. I can't believe I didn't know about it, and I can't believe how incredibly awesome it is.
I've found that the "back to my mac" functionality in Leopard to be incredibly disappointing. I have a lot of Macs that I either own or am responsible for in some way: a couple at home, some at work, and a bunch at my wife's practice. Using VNC viewers like Chicken of the VNC is incredibly inefficient and slow. So I was hoping that the "back to my Mac" thing would let me not only use the more efficient Apple optimizations to remote access, but blow through firewalls so I wouldn't have to use ssh tunnels.
But back to my mac almost never works for me. I think I got it to work once, when I was at home, and accessing the other Mac I have at home. That's not a very interesting use case.
Anyway, I had resigned myself to staying on Apple Remote Desktop, which is a really nice application, but is also total overkill for what I want to do most of the time: just get access to a desktop.
So, that's all a lot of annoying background to get to a simple how-to. If you have enabled remote management on a mac, and you want to open the Leopard screen-sharing application, just do this in a terminal:
open vnc://IPADDRESS-OF-REMOTE-MAC