Transparent VPN, Printing From Anywhere with Hamachi

I first started messing with Hamachi a few months back. It offered the possibility of transparent VPN between all of the machines I work on. While I'd love to pretend that I'm organized enough to make sure that the files I'm working on migrate with me appropriately via removable media when I go from machine to machine, it'd be a gargantuan lie.

No. I often find myself with a file that I *wish* I'd remembered to move along. Things like IMAP email and my excursions into S3 storage help, but still require deliberate moving of things around and don't account for just plain no realizing you might need the file in another context.

Hamachi creates a VPN that sits on top of your regular networking (meaning the network resources wherever you're working aren't messed up) and connects your PC's together. You create a network by name and give it a password. From there, you install it on all of your machines and have them join your new private network. After that, the normal Windows file sharing, etc. all works between those machines. If they're in the same Windows workgroup, you can just connect via machine name and if not, by it's Hamachi IP address.

There are other VPN solutions, but many completely take over the networking, making the machine exclusively on the VPN and not on the local network. Others require a more centralized server setup, where Hamachi is pretty much P2P.

It's not 100% yet, but works well enough to get some serious utility out of it. While the filesharing is cool, the thing that impressed me the most was being able to print to the network printers in my basement (both the laser and the desktop inkjet) from anywhere I'm online. I was able to map the printers as "Remote Laser" and "Remote Inkjet" and can now print to home as easily as I print to anywhere more local. Very cool way to get paper copies of useful articles home without having to drag the paper around.

I know lots of folks use it for gaming (creating LAN's across the WAN), but I don't play many games, so the other uses really sell it to me more.

Also note that the reason that I didn't keep it around a few months ago was that I spent a lot of time behind a really restrictive firewall for most of my days, even with my own laptop. That's because it uses UDP to create its tunnel. There's a pretty good chance if you're in a Fortune 500 setting, that the firewall is similarly set up. In that case, there aren't really any solutions that will do this kind of thing easily.

The folks at Hamachi have promised that they'll have a version that can be tunneled over an open web port in the future, but are planning for it to have a monthly cost. However, if you've ever needed that file that's sitting on your machine at home while you're at work, it would probably be worth it.