SSH to Your Mac From (Almost) Anywhere

13 Feb 2013

Some time last year I was sitting at a coffee shop hackin’ away on my work laptop. I noticed that my other laptop, which was sitting at home, was showing up in the Finder sidebar. I assumed it was just cached from when I was at home, but when I clicked on it I was amazed to discover that after a brief delay I was connected to my Mac at home.

It occurred to me that this was probably Back to My Mac at work, and I got curious about how BtMM works. In the process of investigating, I learned enabling BtMM on a Mac causes that machine to be advertised via mDNS on any other Mac that is attached to your iCloud account and has BtMM enabled. What’s more, you can SSH to that host and be connected to your Mac. It’s trivial to enable this and pretty easy to use.