Howdy ho folks, I guess this could go in the networking forum but it's more tailored to this section me thinks.

My aim
Allow a friend to access a hard drive on my mac mini over the internet so he can stream my movies on his MacBook. I really want to steer clear of having to port forward, I want something similar to Air Video which I just put a pin into the app and it finds the Air Video server on the mac mini.

Any suggestions peeps?

YouTube. Save your bandwidth. Uploading speeds will be much slower than download speeds, so the performance at the other end will not be as good as you expect.

Orb?

??

Didge

My upload speed is 8meg, my mate's download is slower than my upload so no problem there. I don't think youtube would be too pleased me uploading my movies to them, Orb looks interesting. I would really like the mac mini to pop up in his finder like back to my mac.

I think you can do this with MobileMe. Or drop box?

Mobile me would have been ideal but back to my mac would need the same me account on both mac's and he has his own account. Dropbox would be fine for small files but I have GB's of movies.

I've gone the port forwarding route, which thanks to BT's home hub 2.0 allows super simple port forwarding. Can't believe I'm praising the hell hub, although it only downloads at 22meg down, but when using my airport extreme I get the full 37meg.

Yup, either of those would do.

If you want a more sophisticated solution, but one that is limited by the upload speed on your broadband as described, you can look at one of the 'bonjour tunneling apps' like Slink or Sharetool. They basically create a 'pipe' over the internet which makes it look like two macs in separate places are actually plugged into the same router. You can share files, printers, use iTunes & iPhoto sharing etc. They're designed so people with a laptop can connect to their 'home' macs services while on the road but there's no actual requirement for both computers to be owned by the same person as far as I can tell. PLus they're then 'two way shares' so you can pass stuff between you both ways easily. All depends exactly what you want to share and whether it's just a one off job or you'll want to do it regularly. I use Sharetool to connect my work mac to my home one. Seems to work fine.

Downloads at 22Meg? Are you on FTTC or something?

I like the look of ShareTool defo going to look into that now.



Yeah FTTC BT infinity

I hate you

1GB file downloads in less than 4 minutes

I hate you too and I'm not even geeky like that lol