Mac in Cloud (AWS)— Get Started

Start with conclusion: you can’t use this as sub PC

3 min readDec 3, 2020

Mac in Cloud is impressive but still not for remote sub PC

Because AWS EC2 instance display which support max resolution 1024 x 768

We can access this mac instance by VNC protocol and RDP protocol by NuoRDS, but not like Windows RDP, Linux xRDP server, it does not support dynamic resolution.

We should use AWS Workspace which support till 8k resolution for Sub Desktop Usage for remote mac (or buy arm mac)

But there will be nerds who wants to setup aws mac instance, so I write below.

Request Flow

Find region where we can allocate dedicated host for mac1 instance
go to Service Quotas — Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
find Running Dedicated mac1 Hosts and request quota increase to 1 or 2
Wait 1 day — even after complete mail, you could not able to allocate host

Setup Flow

Make Internet Gateways
Make Route Table — Register Internet Gateway
Make VPC — Register Route Table
Make Subnets — Connect to VPC
Make Security Group — Connect to VPC — Allow Inbound rules 22(ssh), 5900(vnc), rdp(3389)
Make Network Interface — Connect to Security Group, Subnet, VPC
Create Dedicated Hosts — mac.metal
Create Key Pairs — Download

And Then, make mac1 instance — Connect to network interface, VPC, Subnet, Subnet, Key Pairs with Auto-assign Public IP

Connect SSH

ssh ec2-user@{ip} -i {key_file_path}

Mac Enable VNC by SSH

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -configure -allowAccessFor -allUsers -privs -all
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -configure -clientopts -setvnclegacy -vnclegacy yes
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -configure -clientopts -setvncpw -vncpw XXXXXX
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -restart -agent -console
sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate

2. screen sharing

sudo defaults write /var/db/launchd.db/com.apple.launchd/overrides.plist com.apple.screensharing -dict Disabled -bool falsesudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.screensharing.plist

3. passwd

sudo /usr/bin/dscl . -passwd /Users/ec2-user XXXXXX

VNC Client

https://www.realvnc.com/en/connect/download/viewer/
just connect by ip, type id(ec2-user), passwd

RDP (optional)

NuoRDS is only mac rdp server as I known, but not like windows rdp server or xrdp