So if you have a Mac say at your friends home, is there an easy way to diagnose it. I’ve tried this a bunch with Windows machines, but never quite got all the connections right. So maybe Apple works better. On a single network this is great, you can Share Screen with other Mac’s and it is so easy, but what if you are going over the Internet to another network, what do you do. Here are some tips. The main thing is there is a professional tool called Apple Remote Desktop which looks like the big brother of what is built in. It is insanely expensive at $500 for unlimited destops and $300 for 10 managed desktops.
Apple Remote Desktop: Connecting through a firewall or NATIf you are planning to use Apple Remote Desktop through a firewall or network address translation (NAT), be sure that traffic is allowed on UDP port 3283. ARD does not use TCP port 328
So if you don’t want to do that, what are the options. Well, the good news is that deep in the guts, Screen Sharing and Apple Remote Desktop. Because Mac OS X is really Unix, it is pretty easy to write some cool scripts. For instance, to do this as a one liner which creates a new command stss hostname
alias stss=’echo 127.0.0.1:59000 | pbcopy; \ open /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen\ Sharing.app; \
ssh -C -4 -L 5901:127.0.0.1:5900′