Apple Location Services!

Question

Level 1

10 points

Apple Location Services!

Hello,

This is not a wild cry of anger about Location services such as iCloud, I think that they are brilliant, and that is exactly my point.

At the moment I am unable, however hard I try, to find my Mac Book Pro on iCloud when I am at home, presumably because apple have not got my MAC address or location information so that my Mac can talk to the mother ship and work out where it is.

It works perfectly at my place of employment, but not at home with my personal router.

My Question is as follows:

Is there a service available for me to submit my MAC address and latitude/longitude co-ordinates to Apple, thereby allowing my home router to be recognised by location information softwares?

Thanks for the help,

4r1

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Nov 8, 2011 2:27 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 8, 2011 5:21 PM in response to 4r1

No.

Your gateway-router probably doesn't support the required features; see HT1109 for details and troubleshooting.

Your firewall doesn't have a mechanism that the tracking software can use to permit the Apple servers to establish a connection through your firewall; basically, a way to open up an inbound connection.

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Answer 2

4r1 Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 8, 2011 5:40 PM in response to MrHoffman

Ok.

So you are saying that the problem isn't with my router not being on the database, as I do live in a rural area and it is unlikely that a google vehicle has come here, instead you think that it is an issue with my router?

I was reading the link you posted regarding Back to My Mac, but that didn't seem to help me much. I can use all of the software described by that document (Screen Sharing, ssh, Network Printing, all network related things) so I'm not too sure what to make of it.

If my firewall is an issue, can I not just open up the required ports, or do some simple port forwarding. I also thought that my firewall isn't installed on the Router, but on my laptop, and I do not have issues with finding my location when on different networks, so that is also a little confusing.

Finally, what features would my router be required to support, to use location services?

Thanks,

4r1

[After some background reading this appeared. Do you think that it may be related?]

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Answer 3

Nov 8, 2011 5:52 PM in response to 4r1

Features required? UPnP or NAT-PMP.

If you want the technical details and the details around why there's no easy way to open up inbound ports for one of these requests, read up on how UPnP and NAT-PMP works, and what these services provide.

Having dug around in those implementations... At its simplest, the firewall must provide a mechanism where the client can communicate directly with the firewall, and allow a remote server to connect through the firewall into the Mac on an arbitrary port. This involves opening up an arbitrary port, and also setting up port forwarding through to a particular Mac client behind the firewall. The port is not a specific and pre-designated port, which means port forwarding doesn't fit here.

(I'm here assuming Apple is using the same scheme for iCould and Back-to-my-Mac stuff. I see no reason why they would have changed this, but I don't know for certain that this is the case; I've not sniffed the Lion iCloud network traffic to confirm the implementation is the same. This is the underpinnings of that other article you referenced. Apple had collected data on and located the WiFi router based on its MAC address, and that router was subsequently moved.)

(Apple's been mapping WiFi networks for a while, and I'd be very surprised if there was a dependency on Google here. That hasn't been the case in the past.)

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Answer 4

4r1 Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 9, 2011 1:38 PM in response to MrHoffman

I am sorry for that mistake about Google, I have been doing some background reading, in fact I meant Apple.

Ok, my router is the NETGEAR DG8343 and I have got UPnP turned on. Is the advertisement period or the advertisement time to live important, as these settings are set to default, so I'm not sure if that would effect anything.

So what do I need to do do you think? My router seems to be compatible, I'm pretty sure that its not on any apple Database as I don't think they could access my house by road, so that might be to do with it.

Sorry for this to turn out to be more complicated than I thought! Any suggestions?

Thanks, 4r1

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Answer 5

Nov 9, 2011 4:41 PM in response to 4r1

Ring up Apple support (if you have that access available) or check with an Apple Genius. I'm out of ideas.

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