I've been trying to get access to a Mac-based LAN working for awhile now. I experimented with OpenVPN, but found that the difficulties with setting up a network bridge made it only somewhat useful... it doesn't appear to be possible to view the entire LAN. I've also used port tunneling with SSH, and that's more-or-less worked but it's still somewhat limiting. At least it's setup is not as involved as OpenVPN. There's also no UDP capabilities (at least not without some finicky setup) so accessing any of the services that require UDP is pretty much out of the question. It still means setting up a bunch of port forwards on the router and shell scripts for any machine on the LAN that I want to connect to.

Then I stumbled across ShareTool and suddenly everything became very, very easy. It does everything that I've been trying to get working. Having access to the LAN's Bonjour services on the client computer is all that's needed... one connection to one Mac on the LAN reveals all of the Bonjour services that are available on the LAN. Desktop sharing, file sharing... it's all there.

Once the connection is made ShareTool provides a simple browser window that shows the available nodes and services. But, because it's simply using Bonjour, the services also show up in the Finder window. So if I want to connect to a particular resource as a different user then I just connect through Finder.

Since ShareTool is running through ssh it means that all traffic is fully encrypted. It also means that you can mess around with the ssh configuration and ShareTool will simply work with those changes. As an additional security measure I generally use passwordless logins (by disabling terminal password prompts and using rsa key pairs). It turns out that ShareTool works almost flawlessly with this type of configuration. The only inconsistency I found was that I still had to enter something in the password field (even just a single character worked) in order for the "Connect" button to become enabled.

I submitted a feature request to have the "Connect" button enabled all the time and received a prompt reply from the developer. And prompt support is definitely something to be valued.