Troubleshooting Back to My Mac

ByMike Moffit

I recently set up Back to My Mac, a feature of MobileMe, so I could access files on a home computer while I was on the road or at work. I had a tough time getting it set up initially, and was met with cryptic error messages and plenty of frustration.

Whenever I run into trouble, I turn to Google for answers. It turns out the Back to My Mac feature uses a suite of protocols called IPsec, designed for secure IP (Internet Protocol) communications. I found an article suggesting that connection failures could be due to the client and server system times being out of sync, and it struck me that the Mini at home required me to manually reset its clock after every restart. I was trying to connect at 9:30 AM to a computer that thought it was around 11PM.

Surely enough, after going home for lunch and to reset the time on the Mac Mini, I was able to immediately connect from work. If you’re outright unable to use the Back to my Mac feature of MobileMe, check that the time is synchronized as closely as possible.

Of course, there are some more elegant solutions to the time synchronization problem. The ideal is to install a replacement backup battery (often referred to as a PRAM battery, but correctly referred to as a backup battery) in the affected computer. I wound up doing this last night, and of course no longer need to reste the time. I also could have set the home computer to synchronize with a time server using the Date and Time Preference Pane.

Unfortunately, though, this computer has some software issues that prevented me from accessing System Preferences at all. Because this computer is so heavily customized, and I don’t really need access to System Preferences, I didn’t want to embark on any extensive software repair or reconfiguration. I’ll get to the root cause eventually!

My co-workers will agree that technicians tend to have rickety computers. We use them hard and swear by AppleCare.

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