I mentioned it once before as part of a different post, but didn’t do the review justice.
Hamachi is a new VPN product/service that creates and manages VPNs end to end. You can have separate networks for different groups of computers. It handles NAT to NAT situations which is a killer feature. Normally if you have two ends of a VPN at least one of them has to have a non-NAT IP, but not with this.
I’m also using it as a remote support tool. On all the family computers I support, I’m installing it and configuring remote desktop for just the hamachi virtual network adapter. That way I can get secure access to those machines when I need to get fix something.
Now of course I have this post in draft mode and they had some problems with the directory servers this morning, but since this is still in alpha-beta mode and I think it totally rocks I’m willing to give them a break and chalk it up to growing pains.
I recommend setting the “block new members by default” to on. I also keep all my connections on my side blocked until I need to use them. And like I alluded to before you can control the firewall on the hamachi network pretty well using Windows XP’s SP2 firewall.