Of course, once we have authenticated to the Mac, we can issue shell commands as if we had a local Terminal session open on the computer. Remote Mac OS X Terminal session from Windows In the screen output you see (a) the connection and authentication process (b) a run of pwd to test that we are in fact connected to a Mac and (c) authentication as the root superuser. The following image shows a PuTTY-based SSH connection to a remote Mac OS X computer. NOTE: Technically, we could use the built-in Telnet client in Windows to establish to the Mac OS X Telnet server, but as we both know, this protocol is hideously unsecure. Both are easy to use, and accomplish the same goal. I would suggest that you try either OpenSSH or PuTTY. Thus, we will have to download an SSH client. Unfortunately, Microsoft has never (repeat: never) included built-in support for this vendor-neutral, open-source protocol in its operating systems. We can use a Secure Shell (SSH) client in Windows to establish a secure remote Terminal connection to our target Mac OS X computer. You may need to take this information into account when firewalls and Internet connections are involved.

NOTE: VNC uses TCP port 5900 and SSH uses TCP port 22 by default. Supply a strong password and click OK to complete the configuration.Įnabling incoming VNC connections in Mac OS X To enable the VNC server, select Remote Management and then press Computer Settings….A drop-down pane appears in which we can select VNC viewers may control screen with password. 🙂Įnabling inbound SSH connections in Mac OS X In the screenshot below, 'uwarnti' refers to the currently logged on Mac user, and the IP address is, well, the IP address.

The status area at right helpfully informs us of our SSH connection string. To turn on the SSH server, enable Remote Login. On your Mac OS X computer, open the Sharing System Preferences pane. Thus, we have immediate, “out of the box” remote connectivity to our Mac boxes. The good news is that Mac OS X (both the server and desktop varieties) include built-in File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Secure Shell (SSH), and Virtual Network Computing (VNC) servers.

Ssh for mac os x