Different ways to connect to your Mac Mini

Connecting to your mac mini while at home or away is crucial, especially if you don't have a keyboard mouse and monitor permanently attached. One piece of lingo we need to set straight deals with which computer we're talking about. I will always use "localhost" to refer to the computer that you are connecting to your mac mini. For me its generally my laptop that I use at work and I bring home. "Remotehost" is this case the mac mini. Its the computer you generally have to connect to.

There are countless ways to connect and each way provides different services and are great for different things. I'm only going to talk about the ones I use, but they are so handy that you will probably make great use of them as well.

This instructable talks about connecting to your mac mini with just a network connection. If you are copying files you might want to connect with either a network cable or a firewire cable.

We'll talk about file sharing between macs

Then we'll talk about screen sharing and screen sharing remotely.

We'll talk about SSH and SCP, which are used extensively in the later instructables in this group.

This part of a compendium. Check out the other parts at:
http://www.instructables.com/id/READ-ME-FIRST-How-to-setup-the-ultimate-Mac-Mini-/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Setting-up-the-ultimate-Mac-Mini/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Different-ways-to-connect-to-your-Mac-Mini/
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-access-your-music-from-anywhere-with-your-M/
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-share-your-photos-from-your-mac-mini-on-the/
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Setup-the-Ultimate-Media-Player-with-the-Ma/

Step 1 File Sharing between macs

If you are copying a large number of files that don't reside in one folder, or if you'd like to easily cherry pick files from one computer to put on another then this is clearly the best way. File sharing either allows you to see the 'public' folders that the remotehost user chooses for file sharing, or it also allows you to see and write to all the remote users stuff if you have the login and password for that user. Unfortunately, this only really works if you're on the same network.

First you need to setup the 'remote host' for file sharing. Go to Apple Menu>System Preferences>Sharing. Click on File Sharing to activate it. If you want to add any public folders, which are available to other users go ahead and do that. Otherwise, if you just want your folders available to the people who know the login information for the remote user, then you can leave that part blank.

Click on options brings up a dialog for choosing the sharing protocol type. If you want to share files with windows users click on SMB, but again they'll need login information unless you make some folders 'public'.

If you're local host computer is a mac, then it should see the computer under 'Shared' in a new finder window (Command + N). If you don't see it in the finder window, click "all" in the lefthand column. If for some reason you removed this from your default window display, you can connect to server by going to "Go>Connect to Server" then pressing browse. This should bring up a list of computers that are sharing files. Click on your desired remotehost. It will, by default try to connect as a guest, if you don't have that enabled or you need more access, you can click "connect as" in order to login as a user on that computer. This means you need the login information for the user whose files you are trying to access.

Comments

[Morriscow]

 woo VNC rocks
i did this with an old AlBook and wired im gonna wire it through a security system, ssh, vnc, ftp, etc, a tv, my phone via the things i mentioned before, and im gonna make all the alerts and stuff an RSS feed if i can.
WOULDNT tHAT LAST ONE BE AWESOME?!?!?!?!?!