Remote into your Macintosh from Windows

I discovered this great video how to on the net. It demonstrates how to setup remote desktop on the Macintosh for free, no need for apple remote desktop. It also allows you to control your Macintosh via a Windows machine. I have configured my Macintosh this way and it works great. I setup everything on a thumb drive so I can take it with me anywhere.

  1. On your windows, machine download puttygen.exe from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
  2. Generate a private key file and save it on your thumb drive also save your public key file and copy it to the Macintosh you want to control.
  3. On your Macintosh, copy the “publickey.txt file you created in step 2 to your user directory.
  4. Make sure that port 22 is open to this Macintosh if you have any firewall in place
  5. Open terminal (applications/utilities) and type “mkdir .ssh” to create the .ssh folder
  6. Type “chmod 700 .ssh”
  7. Type “mv publickey.txt .ssh/authorized_keys”
  8. Type “chmod 600 .ssh/authorized_keys”
  9. Type “sudo nano /etc/sshd_config”
  10. After you type in your password hit control W and type “AllowTcpForwarding”
  11. Delete the # sign
  12. Control W again and type “PasswordAuthentication”
  13. Remove the # and change the yes to no
  14. Control W and type “UsePam” and remove the # sign from this line
  15. Control X and save the file
  16. If you want the finger print type “ssh-keygen –l –f  /etc/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub” and write the hash value down or save it to a text file on your thumb drive
  17. Open up system prefs and click on shareing make sure you have a check next to the remote login service
  18. Next download OSXVNC from http://www.redstonesoftware.com/products/vine/server/vineosx/index.html and start it up
  19. Back on the Windows machine download putty.exe from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ and UltraVNC from http://ultravnc.sourceforge.net/ I put both of these application on my thumb drive
  20. Start Putty and under session IP type the IP address of your Macintosh, goto the Data item in the list on the left and Auto-login username type your Macintosh short name, go under the SSH item and on auth private key browse to your private key file you created in step 1, finally goto tunnels 5900 for source port and localhost:5900 for destination and click add.
  21. Now click Open if this is your first time on the machine connecting to the mac you should get a popup with the hash value from step 16 if this does not match some one is possible doing a “man in the middle” attack to hack your Macintosh
  22. If the hash matches click Ok and then type the password you setup for your private key file.
  23. Startup UltraVNC and connect to localhost
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