Accessing work Mac from home

I currently work from home as a brand designer. I'm thinking of moving away (turning the home into a business and buying another home) - What's the best way to still have access to my main (work) Mac from home and what hardware is involved? I need to be able to work on the same files and not worry about having multiple versions on 2 different computers which will obviously create probs! Being a designer I work on large image files - something to bear in mind I think?
Thx 4 any help.

The technical is easy. The practical is not. First the technical. Assuming that you will have an office LAN with your workstation, server, etc. the best method of connecting is a VPN. This is safe (read secure) and is generally pretty simple to set up. Assuming you have a Firewall/VPN in place, the cost to configure for your Mac should be trivial. On the high end, < $100 for a vpn client like VPN Tracker. Check your Firewall/VPN vendor for a Mac client. If they have one than no need to pay for a client. Other method include port maps but they are less secure and can result in system compromise when poor passwords are used.
But now for the practical. As a designer, you files are large. Attempting to open a Photoshop document across the internet is a exercise in pain and heartache. You would need a really fast connection (> 50 Mb/sec synchronous) on both ends and you still will be susceptible to loss of data and problems. (Recall that most LANs today are 1000Base (1000Mb/sec., and those that are not are 100). I would instead recommend doing a remote control of your work machine with ARD or Screen Share (VNC) or looking at Aqua Connect (http://www.aquaconnect.net/?page_id=26). The idea here is that your work machine remains running and you make a secure connection over VPN. Then you remote control your work machine and it is doing all the opening, saving, and communication with shared resources. All your home machine is doing is getting the screen updates.
Hope that helps.

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Everything works fine when I'm on the network locally - I can send and receive external emails etc.
However, I can't access the server from home using either the domain name or IP address. I used to be able to but we've recently changed ISP & router and I'm not sure if this has affected it.
DNS Basics: the DNS server basically resolves a 'name' to an IP address. E.g. mail.mydomain.com to the IP address of the mailserver.
When you are inside the local network (LAN), your computers probably find the server using a local IP address. When you are outside the LAN, then your computer will find it EITHER by using the public IP address of your firewall OR using a name which will resolve to the same.
Since it worked before you changed ISPs, I'm guessing that you had it set explicitly to the WAN IP address. This will have changed with the change of ISP.
Easiest way to fix this is to use the same host name as you MX record is set to. So if your MX record is mail.mydomain.com then use this as it is obviously resolving to the IP address of your mail server (or more exactly, the IP address of your firewall).
NEXT, since your router has also changed (and I presume this is also your firewall) then you need to ensure that the imap port required (143) is open and port-forwarding to the internal IP address of the mail server.
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how do I access my work mac from my home mac?

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http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4907
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Today, i finally had the oppurtunity to try using the Back to My Mac feature. My G5 was on at home and i had a wireless connection at work and needed a file on my G5. so i went to the shared section in the side bar and it wasn't there to access.
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In addition, does your work have a corporate firewall? If it does, they most likely block the networking ports that BTMM uses.
When i got home i tried again. This time i could see the G5 in the side bar, but could not tell if it was through the internet or if i was seeing it through my wireless network.
Very likely this is local LAN via Bonjour.
when i tried to access using the back to my mac by clicking on the shared volume in the side bar, i could not access it, it finally gave me an error message saying that the server may not be available.
Do you have your Firewall enabled? Security System Preferences
Did you enable Screen Sharing (I'm guessing you did, but I figure it is worth asking) Sharing System Preferences
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Accessing work Mac from home

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