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BusyCal User Guide

Table of Contents

Syncing calendars over the internet (WAN)

BusyCal is designed to automatically share calendars with other BusyCal users on your local area network via Bonjour. If you wish to share calendars with a BusyCal user in a remote location, you may do so by configuring BusyCal for remote access over the public internet (WAN). This method requires a public IP address and port-forwarding on your router, and is recommended for advanced users only.

Wan1

Note: Port Forwarding is a complex topic and is recommended for advanced users only. As an alternative to port-forwarding, you can sync BusyCal calendars between Home and Work or with remote users using Google Calendar as a conduit. This can be achieved without making any modifications to your router and enables you to sync from any location, even while traveling.

Port forwarding

To configure BusyCal for remote access requires a static public IP address for your Cable/DSL Modem, a static private IP address for the Mac on your LAN that is Publishing calendars on the LAN with BusyCal, and port-forwarding on your router (which may be your Cable/DSL Modem, an Airport Extreme Base Station, or some other device) configured to forward all incoming requests on a certain port (4990 is the default for BusyCal) to your Mac's private IP address.

It is beyond the scope of this user's guide to explain how to configure port-forwarding on your router, but the following resources may prove helpful:

If you are comfortable with port-forwarding and wish to use this method, you may continue with the following instructions for configuring one Mac to publish calendars over the internet, and the other Mac(s) to subscribe to calendars over the internet.

Publishing calendars over the internet

To publish calendars for other BusyCal users to access over the internet, you will have to configure BusyCal to listen for incoming traffic on a static port and configure your router to forward incoming traffic on that port to your computer.

Bonjour Pref
  1. Select BusyCal > Preferences > Bonjour, select the Static radio button, and enter a port number between 1000 and 65535 (BusyCal will default to port 4990). Optionally, you may use SSL to encrypt the data. If you wish to use a different port number, see well known TCP ports used by Apple software products to choose a unique one.
  2. Configure your router to forward all incoming traffic on the port specified above to your computer's private local IP address. See the documentation that came with your router for information on how to configure port forwarding.
  3. You must publish calendars on the LAN for them to be accessible over the internet.

Note: You should designate one Mac as the central host where all calendars are published. The central host is the computer that should be configured for port-forwarding, as described above.

Subscribing to calendars over the internet

BusyCal automatically displays all of the calendars being published on your LAN in the source list. If you wish to subscribe to calendars over the internet, you will have to configure BusyCal to connect to the remote publisher by selecting Connect to Remote BusyCal User from the Calendar menu.

Busycal Server
  1. Enter the remote user's public IP address or domain name followed by a colon and the port number (e.g. 62.188.79.140:4990 or my.example.com:4990). If no port is specified, the default port 4990 will be used.
  2. Select how often you would like BusyCal to check for changes (every 5 minutes is recommended). Note: any changes you make will be sync'd to the server immediately. Otherwise, BusyCal will check with the server at the specified interval to see if any events have been changed by others.

The remote server will be added to the source list. You can change the server IP address, alter the refresh interval, or disconnect from the server in the Server Settings dialog, by control-clicking the server name and selecting Server Settings.

Server Settings

Note: You can subscribe to a server in your office via Bonjour and then connect to it remotely while at home or traveling by following the steps above. When doing so, BusyCal will recognize that the server you are connecting to remotely is the same server that you have connected to via Bonjour, and will bind the two together as one entry in the source list. And BusyCal will automatically choose the best method for connecting to that server (it will connect via Bonjour when you're on the same LAN, otherwise it will connect over the internet).