Hamachi - Free, Effective VPN

I thought I'd kick off the software section with a good report of some software I recently played with.

For all too long I've been looking for a good, easy-to-use VPN solution. Many of us have tinkered with setting up a VPN and gasped at the required setup, when all we wanted to do was get some friends computers networked together. Windows XP has a wonderful VPN solution. It allows you to make users and security settings with minimal playing around. Only problem is it will only ever allow 1 person to connect! Bravo Microsoft.

I asked on the Vanguard Forums the other day if anyone knew of a decent VPN solution and to my surprise someone did, behold Hamachi.

Hamachi is a lightweight Windows or Linux application, once you run it you connect to one of many Hamachi servers and it comes back at you with an IP address. You then press create or join a network, enter a network name and a password. Done. Other users do the same, enter your network name and password and they become part of the same VPN. You can play games via LAN browsers and share files and printers - a full-blown VPN.

So, whats with connecting to the Hamachi servers then, is data getting routed through them? Nope! The Hamachi servers just mediate the connections (which surprisingly works through NAT/firewalls) and then the connections are direct peer-to-peer. This allows you to connect and then pick any network name without having to worry about servers being up, hardware, etc.

http://www.hamachi.cc/.