ShareTool — remote access for any Mac application or service that uses Bonjour

When my MobileMe account came up for renewal, I let it expire. I did not need it. I had found cheaper and bet­ter alternatives.

When Apple’s $99 MobileMe ser­vice was released I was quick to reg­is­ter. With MobileMe I could access my mail, con­tacts, and cal­en­dar infor­ma­tion in the “cloud” and keep every­thing in sync across my Macs, my iPod Touch (not iPhone for me as yet), and the web auto­mat­i­cally. I could upload my pho­tos to a web gallery and invite my friends and fam­ily to view my photo slideshow and down­load their favorites. iDisk allowed me to store and share files online and access them from another Mac, or from my iPod Touch or from a web browser on any com­puter. With iDisk Sync, I could keep a copy of my iDisk files on my local hard drive for offline edit­ing and when I recon­nected my changes would auto­mat­i­cally sync back to my iDisk.

How­ever, when my sub­scrip­tion for MobileMe came up for renewal I let it lapse. Why? I’ve been using the Google Mail ser­vice since it launched in 2004 and with Snow Leop­ard I am able to sync my Gmail to Mail.app, my Google Cal­en­dar to iCal, and my Google Con­tacts to Address­Book. I can access these ser­vices from any com­puter with a web browser (I pre­fer Google Chrome), any Mac on which I have an account, and from my iPod Touch (and iPhone if I had one). All for FREE!

But what about MobileMe’s Gallery fea­ture? I’ve had a Flickr Pro account for a few years. For just $24.95/year, Flickr pro­vides me with unlim­ited uploads and stor­age for high-resolution orig­i­nal images and high-definition video. With a free Flickr account, you can upload 2 videos and 100MB worth of pho­tos each cal­en­dar month. I can cre­ate slideshows, edit my pho­tos, share with friends and fam­ily, or link my pho­tos back to my blog. Don’t try any of that with MobileMe.

While MobileMe pro­vides 20GB of stor­age that space is used for all your email, cal­en­dar, address book, pho­tos, and files. With my pho­tos hosted on Flick, and my email,calendar and address book safely stored on Google’s super reli­able “cloud”, I found that I did not need much online file stor­age. I started using Drop­box. Drop­box allows me to sync my files online and across mul­ti­ple com­put­ers (Mac, Linux and Win­dows) — auto­mat­i­cally. The free ver­sion pro­vides 2GB of online stor­age, which is quite suf­fi­cient for my needs. Shar­ing files is sim­ple and Drop­box pro­vides access to my files via any web browser and my iPod Touch. Oh, and it also pro­vides inter­ac­tive photo galleries.

So, yes, I let my MobileMe account expire. And I did not miss it. My wal­let felt a lit­tle heav­ier too. I had saved about $75.

Then a few months later I was work­ing on my brother-in-laws Mac and needed access to files on my Mac mini. Of course, the very files I needed would not be on my Drop­box account. I had no way to access my Mac mini. It was then that I real­ized how use­ful MobielMe’s “Back to My Mac” fea­ture is.

Back to My Mac puts any Mac OS X Leop­ard or Snow Leop­ard Mac you use within easy reach. MobileMe finds your remote Mac com­put­ers over the Inter­net and dis­plays them in the Finder on the Mac you’re using. With Back to My Mac Screen Shar­ing, you can con­trol your remote Mac as though you’re sit­ting in front of it.

For­tu­nately my brother-in-law lives near my home but Back to My Mac would have been more con­ve­nient than dri­ving back home, copy­ing the files to the Drop­box folder, and dri­ving back to my brother-in-law’s home. I did not like that. I had to find a solu­tion. A few weeks later I dis­cov­ered an appli­ca­tion from Yaz­Soft called Share­Tool. Share­Tool lets you access all of the Bon­jour ser­vices on your home net­work from any­where. This includes iTunes Music Shar­ing, Screen Shar­ing, File Shar­ing, print­ing, and more. In effect with Share­Tool I can remotely access any Mac ser­vice on my home net­work as though I was phys­i­cally on the home network.

Once installed, Share­Tool presents the user with two choices of oper­a­tion — Con­nect or Share. The Share options con­fig­ures a Mac to pro­vide ser­vices over the Inter­net while the Con­nect options allows the remote Mac to con­nect to that share node. Click the Share but­ton and Share­Tool auto­mat­i­cally con­fig­ures your router and the cur­rent Mac with the proper net­work set­tings. To con­nect to a remote host over the Inter­net from your other Mac you’ll need infor­ma­tion about the Inter­net address address and port that the remote Share­Tool host is using. Don’t worry about writ­ing this down as Share­Tool con­tains a fea­ture that will email this infor­ma­tion to you when you setup the “Share”. Sim­ply copy that infor­ma­tion from the email into the other Share­Tool and start working.

Share­Tool pro­vides a num­ber of other fea­tures to make access­ing your Mac over the Inter­net both easy and secure. You can spec­ify exactly which Bon­jour ser­vices are avail­able includ­ing, iTunes Music Shar­ing, iPhoto Pic­ture, shar­ing, Apple File Shar­ing, Win­dows file shar­ing, Screen Shar­ing, SSH, print­ing or any other ser­vice run­ning on the remote Mac that uses the Bon­jour ser­vice. I have my HD TiVo set to share files with my Mac via Bon­jour. From work I am able to pull up one of my recorded TV shows and watch it dur­ing my lunch hour. I’m the para­noid type and allow access to my com­puter over the open Inter­net can be scary, so I am happy that Share­Tool encrypts it com­mu­ni­ca­tion using AES-128 bit encryp­tion and uses a unique and ran­domly gen­er­ate key each time a con­nec­tion is cre­ated. Share­Tool can also be used over a VPN and pro­vides an audit fea­ture so I can see exactly which users are using the service.

When shar­ing my net­work I con­fig­ured Share­Tool to send an email with the con­nec­tion infor­ma­tion, auto­mat­i­cally update an exter­nal DNS ser­vice, and auto launch iTunes and iPhoto. From the com­fort of my desk I can lis­ten to my entire iTunes library over the Inter­net. How sweet it is. When con­nect­ing to my home net­work from work Share­Tools will show me my home net­work just as though I was sit­ting at home. I can see all my Macs in the Finder, con­nect to them, open and edit files, move, cre­ate or delete folder — pretty any­thing I could do while at home. I am able to con­nect to my Time Cap­sule over the Inter­net and setup Time Machine to use the remote Time Cap­sule for backup.

I am still play­ing around with Share­Tool but I have not dis­cov­ered any lim­i­ta­tions to what I can do over the Inter­net. The trial copy of Share­Tools lim­its each ses­sion to just 15 min­utes but this is enough time to dis­cover the true poten­tial of this awe­some tool. Share­Tool is just $20 for a sin­gle license but you can get a dis­count when addi­tional licenses are purchased.

Tagged as: LinkedIn, Mac, remote access

Author: Khürt
I'm a husband, a father to two very smart kids, an information security manager and a web developer. I'm a Mac geek who loves photography, hefe-weisse ale and Ethiopian coffee. I'm @khurtwilliams on twitter.