Did anyone's screen sharing app suddenly break recently?

[LincolnsiPod]

I've been using screen sharing (via Messages) to access my parents' Mac Mini without incident for a long time, when it suddenly broke today. I try to connect, and can only get so far as seeing the screen before it quickly kicks me off with an error message. Rebooting the router, both computers did nothing to resolve anything.

I'm wondering if this is related to the recent security update, or maybe High Sierra (I upgraded their OS a few days ago before trying screen sharing, so I'm guessing it must be one of the two). Has anyone else noticed an issue?

 

[LincolnsiPod]

Seriously, it's all working perfectly for everyone? Look at this crap:

It all worked perfectly before, suddenly when I connect, it will show the screen, and then immediately pops up the error window and disconnects despite the fact that I can STILL SEE THE ****ING SCREEN AND IT's ACTIVE OTHERWISE.

The hell???

 

[BrianBaughn]

Obvious question: Did you have you parents check System Preferences>Sharing to make sure Screen Sharing is still checked?

 

[LincolnsiPod]

Obvious question: Did you have you parents check System Preferences>Sharing to make sure Screen Sharing is still checked?

I've been reading into that, and apparently that has nothing to do with screen sharing via Messages. The preferences there are for local access, not access via the internet as done with Messages. Just in case though, I enabled them and still no joy (I went through a series of enabling screen sharing, or remote management, back to my mac, etc etc, with no success).

The weird thing is if I don't click OK, I can watch the screen in viewer mode and it continues to stream live, so it's streaming the other end's screen while at the same time telling me it's "unable to communicate".

I'm going to submit a bug report and hope this is something that either clears up on its own or gets fixed by Apple.
[doublepost=1512599497][/doublepost]P.S. Downloaded Team Viewer today to get around this stupidity, which works perfectly, confirming it's not a firewall/connectivity issue.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Teamviewer has always been good.

 

[OscarMV]

The Messages help has some information about the exact setup you need to have to get this to work. The short version, IIRC, is that if either of the machines has a different account for iMessage and iCloud it won't work. Of course a number of other things could have broken too...

 

[LincolnsiPod]

After some testing, I was able to isolate the issue to the old Mac Mini. Using a different network and different iMac resulted in no issues, but once I tried to screen share with the Mac Mini the connection broke again. I guess it was finally showing its age. Since I upgraded my parents' Mac Mini to a new iMac I haven't had any problems since.