Lighthouse is Leopard-ready
18 11 2007
Since a few people have asked this over last couple of days: Yes, the current version of Lighthouse has been well-tested on Leopard and is Leopard-compatible.
That’s the reason why we did not release an update specifically addressing Leopard, since Lighthouse is already compatible with it. Just make sure that you are running the latest version of Lighthouse by clicking the “Check for updates…” item in the main menu.
However, some users had trouble getting Lighthouse to run on their Leopard installation, not caused by Lighthouse itself, but by third-party system modifications that were not Leopard-compatible yet. If you experience issues with Lighthouse on Leopard (specifically, the Lighthouse icon not appearing when you launch it), please make sure that you do not have any third-party system modifications installed (so-called “Input Manager” hacks) and that there is no legacy application auto-launched via your “Login Items” (You can access your “Login Items” by selecting your account in the “Accounts” view in “System Preferences” and clicking the “Login Items” tab. Just remove all items unless you are absolutely sure that they are Leopard-compatible). Once the problematic tool is removed, Lighthouse will run perfectly on your Leopard installation.
Is there anything I can configure for getting the Back to my mac functionality working?
It’s possible that this works, but you still definitely need to have a .mac account. According to this technical note, Back to my Mac uses UDP port 4500 for the sharing features, so I’d suggest to create and run a Lighthouse profile on the Mac you want to connect to that forwards port 4500 (enter this for both the private and public port). Choose “UDP” or “Both” as the type. According to this article, UDP port 500 is also used, so you might want to add this as well. Running this profile on the Mac you want to connect *to* then might solve your BTMM issues.
However, note that BTMM is actually a pretty complex, dynamic service, so if you have more than one Mac in your home network that you want to use BTMM on, it’s very well possible that it configures a different port than 4500 for one of these Macs. I couldn’t find a definitive guide on which ports need to be forwarded for BTMM (which configures itself automatically on supported routers), but this info might help. Please let me know if you have success with such a profile.
My Lighthouse (v1.2.7) just suddenly stopped working; clicking on the app brings the message “You can’t open the application ‘Lighthouse’ because it is not supported on this architecture”.
I’m running a plain Mac with Leopard, nothing fancy at all. The only modification I’ve made is to – I think – flash the firmware on the DVD drive, for which I installed Windows under VMWare Fusion. But that surely should have no effect on Lighthouse.
Could you please send an email to support@codelaide.com – I can help you more efficiently this way, since the blog isn’t really built to handle support requests.
That being said, the problem could very well be caused by the DVD drive firmware flashing. The error message you are getting is generated by OS X, not by Lighthouse. In fact, OS X refuses to launch Lighthouse at all, so provided that no program tinkered with the Lighthouse application itself, something within OS X must have changed.