09.09.06
Behold the Power of Hamachi - VPN Networking
I have been introduced to Hamachi for quite some time, and I find it extremely useful and interesting. This software is, by no means, a utility that you should go without, especially you someone who is always on the move, and requiring to access your home personal computers (PCs) or workstations that resides behind a firewall or NAT (Network Address Transversal) router.
Introducing Hamachi, a zero-configuration virtual private networking (VPN) application that allows users to arrange multiple computers into their own secure network, as if they were connected by a physical network cable. Typically, there are platforms for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and their installers can be downloaded directly from here. More information is available here at SoftSift.
Windows users have the luxury of running this application in Graphical User Interface (GUI) whereas Mac OS X and Linux will have to be contented with text console. However, even running in text console, Hamachi has proven greatly as powerful VPN networking utility. Moreoever, the connection is via Peer-to-Peer, so no security is breeched, except it Hamachi will always need to ping their own server periodically to ensure connectivity is maintained.
A short tutorial of how to setup Hamachi in Linux environment is shown here.
1. Download linux version of Hamachi from the site - hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx.tar.gz
2. Extract the compressed files into a directory, e.g.,
/home/user/hamachi3. Next, you will need to install hamachi in /usr/bin, to do so, run the following command under ROOT account, i.e.,
sudo make install4. Once installed, run ‘tuncfg’ with root privledges, i.e.,
sudo /sbin/tuncfg5. Finally, Hamachi will require a one-time initialisation (per Linux user account). This step generates cryptographic key pair and creates ~/.hamachi directory where Hamachi stores the keys, configuration and state.
Run: ./hamachi-init
The above steps are only required for one-time installation. The next time you reboot your machine and you need to access Hamachi, you’ll only need to do the following at the command prompt:
- sudo tuncfg
- hamchi start
- hamachi login
- hamachi go-online xyz (Note: if you are not part of a network, you should either first join a network or create a network. To create a network, run: hamachi create xyz, where xyz is your network name. To join a network, simply type: hamachi join xyz. For both you’ll prompted with password creation or password to join the site.)
To shut down the service, do the following at the command prompt:
- hamachi go-offline xyz
- hamachi logout
- hamchi stop
More guidelines on Hamachi for Linux can be found here.
System Requirement
Hamachi for Linux requires Linux 2.4 or newer, and expects a Intel x86 CPU on the box. For older Intel chips as well as K6 and AMD, do use the “Pentium package” instead.
Interestingly, there is also a non-official GUI interface for the linux version, which is developed by PenguinByte, known as ghamachi. A screenshot is shown below.
ghamachi is a binary file ready to run on your GTK+2 enabled desktop (Gnome, KDE, etc..) Both GTK+2 and GTK+1.2 versions and installation instructions are available for download at the site.
