For the past couple of years I have been testing different VPN solutions.

Each solution I tried didn’t really work well, consistently. Some had problems running smoothly under XP, others required so much configuration on the server end they weren’t worth the hassle, and others seemed to work well, but had security holes a third grader could find.

Back in December, Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte discussed Hamachi during the Security Now podcast. I decided to give it a try, and I haven’t looked back.

I now use Hamachi on all my desktop machine and my laptop, all seven servers I am responsible for monitoring, and a few other machines I need to connect too from time to time.

From the Hamachi website:

Hamachi is a UDP-based virtual private networking system. Its peers utilize the help of a 3rd node called mediation server to locate each other and to boot strap the connection between themselves. The connection itself is direct and once it’s established no traffic flows through our servers.

Hamachi is not just truly peer-to-peer, it is verifiably secure peer-to-peer.

Believe it or not, but we are able to successfully mediate p2p connections in roughly 97% of all cases we dealt with so far (few tens of thousands as of early March). This includes peers sitting behind different firewalls and/or broadband routers (aka NAT devices). It is high-tech and it is really cool

The number of users of Hamachi has doubled in the past month and they are experiencing some growing pains, but other than the occasional “restarts” the reliability of the solution is great. Best of all, Hamachi is free.

If you are looking for an easy to set up, easy to use, VPN solution, check out Hamachi. They have versions for Windows and Linux, and I hear there is a version of the Mac coming soon.

I even have Hamachi running as a service on all my machines.

[tags]Hamachi, VPN, Free[/tags]

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