Hamachi - Create your own personal virtual private network

Posted on December 26, 2007 at 6:46 am

If you have ever worked from home, you probably know what a VPN or virtual private network is. Using a virtual private network, you can connect to your office network and access files and data just as if you were physically at the office. Data transfer is a little slower, but you’re able to access network drives and company servers in the same way!

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could connect to your home network in the same way, basically creating your own virtual private network? That way you could be across the world and print to your home printer or access files on another computer just as if you were on the local network. If you have other devices on your home network like a Tivo, network attached storage, or a media center, you could VPN in and stream movies and videos across the Internet. Nice! You can also connect up several computers and play games over the Internet.

Use Hamachi to create a personal Virtual Private Network

Hamachi is a freeware application that you can use on PC or Mac to create your own secure VPN. The best thing about Hamachi is that it’s super easy! Previously, setting up and configuring VPNs was only the job of IT System Administrators as it requires a large amount of technical knowledge.

Hamachi changes all of that by allowing you to create secure, encrypted and authenticated peer-to-peer connections between computers across the Internet with absolutely zero configuration! You can use Hamachi to create a VPN so that you can securely access your home PC files or share them with others.

Recently Hamachi was bought by LogMeIn, a popular service for accessing computers remotely. There is a free version and a premium version. The free version allows users to create up to 64 networks and up to 16 clients on each network which is probably more than enough for most consumers.

To get started, download the free version and unblock the Hamachi application if the Windows Firewall dialog comes up. Then click on the Networks button and choose Create New Network.

Give you network a name and type in a password that you will use to access your network from outside. Make sure the password is hard to guess otherwise someone could hack into your network and access it completely! Click Create and now the network will appear in the Hamachi client.

Now you’ll need to add all of the computers you want to be accessible on this network to the network! First go to the other computers and install the Hamachi client. Then click on the Networks button and click Join Existing Network.

Simply type in the network name and the password and click Join! Now those computers that are joined will be able to access files and data just as if they were on the same local network.

Overall, Hamachi is a very simple application, yet can be used to do all sorts of things! You can remotely access files, stream audio and video across the Internet, securely access FTP/web servers, or play games online over the Internet! Enjoy!

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