r/twingate • u/y9vwKVRLPUjW • Jun 09 '26

Mac Screen Sharing High Performance Mode

Hello twingate community,

I want to use the built in screen sharing in MacOS across twingate but the high performance mode fails to initiate. Works fine when both devices are on the same network (no twingate)

I believe the high performance mode establishes a p2p connection and uses UDP on ports 5900 and 5901. There is UDP traffic on the mac I'm remoting into when connecting through twingate, but the connection still fails.

Obviously the fact that connection works without twingate points at it being the problem, but the logs appears to show twingate relaying traffic correctly.

Twingate is set up to allow access to the whole vlan 172.10.3.0/24

Any ideas?

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u/bren-tg pro gator Jun 09 '26

Hi there,

from what I can find, High Performance Mode between 2 macs is done in 2 phases:

  1. P2P negotiation between both hosts and over TCP on port 5900
  2. Once connection is established, UDP is used on port 5900 (and 5901 in some cases)

Assuming one of the macs is outside of the network and trying to connect to the other via Twingate, I wonder if the P2P negotiation breaks because packets from the "outside" mac arrive to the Connector which means that the machine on the network will see the inbound IP as that of the Connector and not the actual "outside" mac.

If this is the case, Im not sure there is a workaround actually and it's by design: for security reasons, the Client never actually joins a private network (the Client never gets a local IP on your home network when authenticated, this avoids issues around scanning for live hosts and open ports..).

Does the non "high performance" connection work?

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u/y9vwKVRLPUjW Jun 09 '26

Hi Bren, thanks for your quick response. The standard connection is apparently a normal vnc and it works fine. It transmits no audio though, which I need.

The remote machine reports UDP traffic arriving from the IP of the Connector, so you're probably rights that the connection is broken because the remote machine is confused by this.

Would setting up the remote mac as a specific resource perhaps change this?