New website for Jos Van Hulsen Post Industrial Design.
Just the beginning with a few articles and biographical information. Soon to include an online shop for small sculptural items.
Over the past few months of testing various models of Billion routers, updated firmware and configuration we have a working solution.
Back to my Mac is a technology in Mac OSX Leopard that allows the user to connect to every Mac they are in control of over internet connection regardless of where they are. Each computer shows in the finder as it would if sharing is enabled on computers on the same local network. Employing only Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) enabled on a Billion 5200 modem router we were able to successfully screen share and access files from outside our office network both on known and open WIFI access.
It seems that not all Billion routers have this ability regardless of the fact that UPnP is available in most of the routers we tested. The difference seems to be the ability to allow an external application to make changes to the port mapping within the router.
Back to my Mac requires a .mac or mobile@me account. All Macs you wish to access should be configured using the same account. Secure connection data is stored and configured via the connection to this service. Since we use mobile@me to access common data for address books and iCal info across all Macs and iPhones, taking advantage of Back to my Mac seemed obvious. Despite having access to other services like Hamachi and Real VNC for over the internet sharing and control we have concentrated on Back to my Mac given that it requires little user knowledge once set.
Importantly there should only be one device acting as a router and for most home and small office networks we take a look at, there are two at times both acting as a DHCP server. This is mainly due to a later inclusion of a wireless access point, a network retrofit very common these days. In the case of Back to my Mac and other more complex network access applications, one of these routers should be bridged or configured so that does not assign IP addresses for the network.
Importantly when all else fails a quick flick off and on of Back to my Mac in System Prefs is all that was required to get the 5200 working correctly. Given the fact that the Billion 5200 is a domestic grade modem we were surprised by this result and also a little disappointed. The quality of the router is not quite up to spec for our requirements generally as it is a little less than stable in a network of 5 to 10 computers, printers and phones. Generally we would advise an industrial grade Billion router for this task. It is relevant to address the fact that enabling UPnP is not advisable under some circumstances and is not encouraged by the Windows security fraternity. It may also be argued that a more advanced system be used on Macintosh networks also and indeed there is a solution.
Back to my Mac can also employ NAT-PMP, a possibly more secure method of network manipulation. None of the routers we used had this capacity however. Apple Airport devices have the ability to use this technology in a network but we were hard pressed to get any ADSL modem router we tested to bridge successfully and allow the Apple device complete control of the network.
Testing will continue with hardware available in Australia to find the best means of making Back to my Mac usable under all circumstances but in the meantime there seems to be some hope for a small investment.
