Back to My Mac and Windows

[MrManwelo]

I have an Airport Extreme thats hooked up to 2 hard drives, one for media and one for time capsule.

I have a Macbook Pro running OSX Mountain Lion 10.8.2. I want to be able to access my hard drives remotely from both Windows and Mac computers when I'm an University. I cannot download a VNC client onto the University computers, so is there another way to access the drives, say online? I thought I could access them via Back to My Mac and iCloud, but I don't think I can.

Any help? Thanks.

 

[switon]

RE: vnc...

Hi MrManwelo,

For Mac OS machines at your University, you do not need to download a VNC nor a VPN client, as these are already part of the Mac OS X operating system.

It turns out that the Mac OS X 10.8.2 has a VNC viewer client, it is just not found in the Applications folder. In particular, the VNC viewer is called "Screen Sharing.app" and it is located in the directory:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app

You will need to setup your home computers to allow VNC access (both by opening ports on your router and computers's firewalls).

The Mac OS X 10.8.2 also has a VPN client which is found in the Networks Preferences pane of the System Preferences. If you click the add button "+" you will see that you can add a VPN virtual interface. Set up the VPN to point to your VPN server at home and then you can login via VPN to your home network and from there you can mount any shared disks/mount points, giving you access to your home disks from the university. (If the Network Preferences pane is locked by password, you will have to resort to the commandline to do this, or you might also be able to use the Safari web browser to mount your home computers's disks, via pointing your browser to something like: smb://homeIPaddress. When properly setup with the correct ports forwarded, this will mount disks from your home machine to your university machine.)

Switon