Comments on: On routers, Time Capsule, and Back to My Mac

By: John Hancock

John Hancock — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 01:30:46 +0000

I have ATT ADSL and airport extreme. When I try to configure the router to work with ‘back to my mac’ I get the message ‘double NAT’ with advise to put the airport extreme into bridge mode. When I put the airport extreme into bridge mode I get a message ‘you need to use a router that uses NAT!!

What am I doing wrong? Please no smart remarks! I’m new to this stuff and I’m beginning to think this ‘back to my mac’ is joke!

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:53:20 +0000

I have never been able to get Back to My Mac to work… though I can get to my work Mac via Apple Remote Desktop and via IP based file sharing, Back to My Mac doesn’t work.

I have a 802.11N Airport Extreme base station (100MBit ethernet) at home and my work mac is on a routable IP with my .mac account signed in on both ends.

I have tried logging off of .mac on both (even done this via ARD), tried opening ports on my AEBS – and I haven’t had any success. Is this some sort of magic trick to get it to work?

By: Brian R

Brian R — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:11:16 +0000

Off topic from the Apple Fanboy essence of the post, but…

I’ve had a Linksys router for quite a while, and it seems like they’re a bit flaky all the time. About once a month my wireless will drop out and I’ll have to power cycle to router to get it back.

There was also a known issue with some of the earlier versions of the firmware that if you used certain types of encryption then after 30-60 minutes the router would lock up. That was incredibly annoying to figure out. Sounds somewhat similar to the issues you were having as well.

By: gregr

gregr — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 22:26:51 +0000

@Evan – I think you’re right…that explanation is consistent with what I was seeing.

@Glenn – I didn’t mean to imply otherwise; I’ve updated the article text to say “first look” instead of “review”. I was really just trying to say I was pleased that it was running faster than I expected…

By: Glenn Fleishman

Glenn Fleishman — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:22:24 +0000

To be clear, I wrote a “first look,” which is prefaced and bracketed as a quick first pass — it’s not a review. I’ll have a review next week. So far, my testing using just PowerPC G4 equipment is showing really weird results. I can’t achieve more than 11 to 16 Mbit/s. I’ll be testing with Intel gear and gigabit Ethernet later. I haven’t even begun Wi-Fi testing. I would say there’s a processor problem, but I’m watching the same system that can’t top 11 Mbps via Time Machine to Time Capsule over 100 Mbps Ethernet do 100 Mbps via Time Machine to a directly connected FireWire 400 drive. Sure, FireWire is faster, but if you’re only using 10% of the raw signaling power to move data, then quadrupling that shouldn’t provide a 10x boost in data backup.

By: Evan DiBiase

Evan DiBiase — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:03:37 +0000

Awesome! Glad to hear that things are working out.

I just wanted to let you know that, in my experience, cable modems bind themselves to the MAC address of the machine to which they are attached, and require a power cycle if you want them to work when networked in to a device with a different MAC address. So I think your issues there were probably more with the cable modem than with the Time Machine :-)