Screen & file sharing from Mac OS X leopard to vista

[fenfe1]

Hi I know that this may have been asked before but,

I am trying to find some way to share my Mac?s screen with vista (i.e. remote desktop) and to be able to map the Mac?s drives to vista (i.e. network drives)

I have the following hardware:

1. MacBook (the one before the new one) running the latest version of Mac OS X leopard

2. Windows Vista Ultimate (self build PC) running with SP1

3. Belkin draft N router (if it helps at all).

At the moment I can use the remote desktop connection for Mac 2 app to control my vista PC from my Macbook, however as my PC has two screens and a better keyboard & mouse I want to use that to work on and control the Mac in the same way.

I need to keep all the files on my Macbook as I take it to school and can only use the Vista PC when I?m at home.

Therefore I imagine I would require the following:

1. Some form of screen sharing or remote desktop app that can run on vista to control a mac.

2. A method to attach the Mac?s hard disks using ftp, samba, etc.

In terms of screen sharing I have turned on remote management which I believe also controls screen sharing and allowed my account full access (all checkboxes ticked).

I then tried to connect to my Mac using my vista PC, for my first attempt I tried the remote desktop connection app built into vista, (I didn't think this would work but it was worth a try).

I then tried using tightVNC viewer connecting to: "192.168.2.3" (my Mac?s IP) with the following ports, 5900 & 5433.

Both times the connection failed almost immediately (1-2 seconds). I also tried using Felix-Mac. local with no port number, this time it tried to connect for a good 30 seconds before stating it couldn't connect (is this because it was resolving the IP first?).

After this I didn't know of anything else to try, having only been used to going the other way (Mac > vista) I had accustomed to a very easy set-up, i know that apple make their own remote desktop product, but this requires a) me having a Mac, b) having some spare cash (I don't by the way!) so it doesn't look very promising. I did try Google but most of the results where again going the other way, I process much easier (I assume due to Microsoft being more open with remote desktop).

I would very interested if anyone has found a way of doing this, either with VNC or something else. I had read that it may be an idea to run a VNC server on Mac as well, but apparently this is already built into leopard, (I will try this next).

As for file sharing I thought this would be a much simpler process, however...

I have enabled file sharing on my Mac, setting it to allow sharing through AFP, FTP and SMB protocols.

I then tried to connect to my Mac via ftp (with my user account credentials) using filezilla (latest version, on vista) the message I get back is:

"Connecting to 192.168.2.3..

connection timed out

Could not connect to server"

This repeats a further 2 times before giving up.

If I go to ftp://192.168.2.3 in Firefox (latest version on vista) it connects but shows no files (this, I assume, is because I have not provided any sort of authentication.) However if I try and connect using my Macs built in ftp system (i.e. Connect to server) it works fine!

Similarly with using vista's "add a network location" I am unable to connect to my Mac, with explorer saying it can't find the computer. This also happens if I try using SMB instead and there same thing happens.

Again I don't know of any other way to connect to my Mac as I assume there are no AFP clients for windows (Google couldn't help me anyway).

Now in terms of network settings and security,

Both computers are on the same wireless network (obviously!), on the vista the network is set to private and network discovery, file sharing and printer sharing are all turned on. I have also installed bonjour for windows, and am using the stock firewall with all other security as per default settings.

On the Mac I have turned on the firewall for essential services only (I noticed it automatically added all the sharing protocols) and in sharing have turned on DVD / CD sharing, file sharing, printer sharing, web sharing, remote login, remote management and Bluetooth sharing. Wherever possible I have added only my account (Felix) to be allowed access to the computer.

Both computers have been added to the same workgroup (FELIX-NETWORK) using the airport configuration options and I have set the Mac to have a net-bios name of Felix-Macattached linked to screenshots of the sharing pane on the Mac and the network & sharing centre on vista.

View screenshots

Sorry this is such a long post but I didn't want to leave anything out!

Please let me know if you need to know anything else

All your suggestions will be helpful I'm sure so thanks in advance,

Felix Fennell.

[the evn show]

For the sake of testing try disabling the firewalls completely on both computers. If you're on a NAT wireless LAN it'll keep you safe from the baddies out on the Internet. You should be able to ping the two machines from each-other using their internal addresses. If it fails then there's some larger networking issue causing trouble.

With respect to remote administion: that's used to allow a network administrator to send events like "log off the current user", "reboot the system", etc. The option you're looking for is screen sharing. Try the following:

You should be able to connect with VNC software after that.

File sharing looks correct however you can safely disable AFP support because your Windows computer isn't able to connect to those shares without additional software. Ensure that your SMB password is correct as it may be different from your login password.

You should be able to connect to the Mac from your Windows computer using cifs://x.x.x.x or smb://x.x.x.x where x.x.x.x is your Mac's IP address.

When/if you re-enable your firewalls insure that the Mac has the following entries:

edit

And I just replied to a 6-month old post because it was thread-necro'd.

Guess I got excited to see something well thought out and didn't realize the date was ancient.

[+Warwagon MVC]

This thread is dead.