I am going to start a little series on Apps that I run that I can't do without. My first article will be about Hamachi.

Have you ever been in the situation where a family member needed help, and you wished you could VNC or Remote Desktop into their machine to help them out? Or maybe not just secure, but a way to bypass their router's firewall? Or maybe you need a VPN, but don't want to shell out the money for a VPN server. Well, let me introduce you to Hamachi.

How does Hamachi work?

Well, from their website:

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

Believe it or not, but we are able to successfully mediate p2p connections in roughly 95% of all cases we have dealt with so far. This includes peers residing behind various firewalls or broadband routers (aka NAT devices). It is high-tech and it is really cool :)

Check out their Examples for a list of what you can use Hamachi for.

If you want to install it you can find the downloads for Linux, OSX and Winders at http://www.hamachi.cc/download/. If you're worried about security, this is a great tool. I thourghly enjoy it. I think I will write a Hamachi How-to Guide to tie into the Folding@Home Monitoring Page that I'm currently working on. Keep an eye out for it in the near future.