MacOS – How to use AFP with Back To My Mac

afpback-to-my-macmacos

When my Macbook and home Mac were running Mountain Lion, I used Back To My Mac to get to my home system and it showed me all of my drives if I logged in with my normal account credentials. Since I've upgraded to Mavericks, it appears to be defaulting to Samba instead of AFP because I only see the single read-only SMB share I have set up, and I can't log in with my normal account user/pass. When I'm at home, if I manually go to afp://ip.address/ it works fine. Obviously that is not an option with Back To My Mac. Does anybody know how I can get the afp-over-wan behavior back? It was really handy!

Best Answer

You can find your Back To My Mac hostname by doing this:

% dns-sd -E
Looking for recommended registration domains:
DATE: ---Fri 15 Nov 2013---
12:00:39.211  ...STARTING...
Timestamp     Recommended Registration domain
12:00:39.212  Added     (More)               local
12:00:39.212  Added                          icloud.com
                                             - > btmm
                                             - - > members
                                             - - - > 1234567

Using that you can derive the hostname as computer_name.1234567.members.btmm.icloud.com. Now use Finder's "Connect To Server..." command and enter afp://computer_name.1234567..members.btmm.icloud.com in the dialog box. It works! If your computer name has a space in it, replace it with a hyphen. The hostname should be all lower-case, so if your computer name is "My Mac" use my-mac.1234567.members.btmm.icloud.com.

(If your mac is running ssh, you can ssh to it as well, which opens a whole world of secure-tunnelling possibility!)

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