Hamachi Is Cool

We’ve begun testing out Hamachi at work as a substitute for our defunct VPN and it’s showing a lot of promise. It sets up a peer-to-peer VPN which is quite clever and simple to get working. When combined with installing Bonjour on the Windows boxes (Macs have it pre-installed) and tweaking the DNS settings to add .local to the search domains, the DNS look-up works brilliantly cross-platform as well.

I’ve now got access to all the important stuff from work to tinker with my little side-projects while still being able to store them in the work subversion repository so others can join in if they want. It’s an awful lot simpler to work with than the old VPN stuff too.

The only problem I’ve seen is every so often some of the peers in the network fail to be connected to and it doesn’t ever seem to retry.  Since you mostly only need to connect to the servers instead of everyone who happens to be using Hamachi to VPN in, it usually doesn’t matter but it does make me wonder about the reliability.