I have an iMac connected to my router via Ethernet and I have turned off Wifi. I use it as a video server. I have nothing else on it except the video server software (Channels). Instead of constantly going to it to check things, I want to access it from another Mac on the same network. Even though I have Screen Sharing turned on my iMac, I cannot access the screen sharing function from another Mac on the same network. I get a connection error saying to check that it is on the network. It is.
The weird thing is is that I can access files from the iMac with File Sharing turned on. Also, if I turn on Wifi on my iMac, I can then share the screen from another Mac.
Any ideas? I would rather turn Wifi off to ensure the iMac is sending the videos via Ethernet.
I look at the attached devices on my Orbi and I don’t see the Ethernet IP in the list (192.168.1.40). But, for sure, my iMac is connected since I can surf the web on it without Wifi. Weird.
I think it only works one Wi-Fi. I have the same problem with my Apple Watch. Even if they are on the same network, if the Wi-Fi on the Mac is disabled and it is plugged into Ethernet, you can’t use the Watch to unlock, as soon as Wi-Fi is enabled, it works again.
In both instances, the Mac has the same IP address, but the watch will only “see” the Mac, if both are on Wi-Fi.
I think I found the issue. I set my iMac Ethernet to manually reserve an IP address (I need to do this to port forward the video streaming.). I change it to dynamic and has the router reserve the IP. That worked!
In fact, it now has a different IP address. When I was having the issue, I may have assigned it to an address already used!
Most routers allow you to configure the range of IPs given out by DHCP. (Some of them come pre-configured to start at x.x.x.100 for example.) If you can make the DHCP range smaller, that will allow you to arrange to have a few IPs which you can manually configure. Alternatively, many DHCP servers will allow you to use the device’s MAC address to configure a reserved static IP for that MAC address. This will allow you to know what IP the device will always be on, but it will otherwise work like it had a dynamic IP address. (There can be bugs, so usually I prefer to combine both approaches. I limit the range, and then use a reservation to hand out IPs outside that range.)
