Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

Connecting from the Road

You can also connect to your Mac’s regular File Sharing feature (Chapter 12) from over the Internet. This feature is a blessing to anyone who travels, whether with a laptop or to a branch office, because you’ll never be up the creek without a paddle if you discover that you left an important file at home.

To connect over the Internet, make sure that you’ve set up the home-base Mac for file sharing, as directed in Chapter 12. Then, once you’re on the road, go online and proceed like this:

1. Choose Go→Connect to Server.

   The Connect to Server dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 21-4.

   

   Figure 21-4. The Connect to Server dialog box lets you type in the IP address for the shared Mac to which you want access. (Ensuring that the shared Mac is turned on and connected to the Internet is the network administrator’s problem.)

2. Type in the IP address (or domain name) of the Mac to which you want to connect, and then click Connect (or press Enter).

   If you don’t know the shared Mac’s IP address, pick up the phone and call somebody in the office there. That person can find out the shared Mac’s IP address by opening the Network pane (or Sharing pane) of System Preferences.

   And if you’ve signed up for a DNS naming service as described in Section 21.1, you can type your Mac’s domain name instead.

3. Enter your name and password, and then click Connect.

   From here, it’s just as though ...