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I’m a blogger on the go with a massive iTunes library (45,000 songs enough?). I do a really good job of filling my iPod with the essentials but sometimes I need to listen to something not on my iPod. Thanks to Bonjour (previously Rendezvous or commonly mDNS) iTunes or any other Bonjour related service can only be shared on a local network since the mDNS beacons do not travel over a VPN.

Sure there are other pieces of software on the market, but I haven’t had much luck with them for various reasons – plus it really isn’t “true iTunes sharing.” If you connect to your home or business network over a VPN, with this guide, you can easily make those Bonjour beacons hop across the VPN to your remote machine.

In this installment, we will only cover how to use your existing VPN connection. In the next installment of this article I will show how to actually create an SSH VPN to your home network without any fancy software or expensive router.

On the host machine (the computer with the large iTunes library) all you need to do is download Network Beacon from Chaotic Software (as an aside I met one of their developers at Macworld – Really great people!) and launch it. Click on “New Beacon” and enter the following into the new dialog box:

Where it says service name enter whatever you want the share to look like in the remote computers iTunes (eg: Home iTunes Computer). Click OK.

Then on your remote computer connect to your remote network over the VPN. Launch iTunes on the remote computer. Within a minute you should see your other computers iTunes library.

Now, if you don’t have a VPN setup to your home network in a subsequent post I’ll cover how to create an SSL VPN to your home computer using free software and simple port forwarding (something any router can do).