Solo Technology

Ya know, I still see a lot of folks talking about Hamachi. And that’s cool — it is truly an incredible piece of software. I use it just about daily now.

Pre beta 1.0, the trick to using Windows Remote Desktop over Hamachi involved running Hamachi as a service. Well fine, but I wasn’t real gung ho about that. BUT. Beta 1.0 fixed that. Since I upgraded all my stuff to the current beta, RDC works fine and I don’t have to do the service thing. Yet now I’m reading all these posts (and Hamachi patches even!) about running the Beta as a service for RDC. Why?!? I suppose I’m being goofy here, but I just don’t see why I’d want to run this as a service if I don’t have to? How easy is it to work with when running as a service? Can I easily add other networks? Boy, it just seems like a pain.

Or is RDC still not working for some folks with the beta?

[added later]

I’m probably missing some key fact here. I suppose people just want to run it as a service… because? Because they can? I see advantages there if you expect a machine to reboot unattended I suppose. The more I think about it, I suppose that’s just about gotta be it.

[added much later]

Honest, I get it!

6 Responses to “Hamachi VPN as service - why?”

1. Peter on January 16th, 2006 5:01 am
   

   I could see running Hamachi as a service for the reasons you stated above. However, the assertion that running it as a service to resolve some odd RDC behavior seems silly. RDC doesn’t use NTLM, or any other sort of pass-through authentication, so how would altering the ‘runas’ behavior of Hamachi help? I’d love to hear the theory behind that hack, perhaps I’ll browse the Hamachi forums over lunch.

2. chris on January 16th, 2006 7:31 am
   

   The whole thing was related to who started Hamachi, vs. who you were logging in as — for XP. For the windows server OS’s this wasn’t an issue, but I guess for XP if you attempted to RDC as the same user that started Hamachi, you’d get biffed…

3. joe on January 24th, 2006 4:19 pm
   

   running hamachi and allowing another to vpn in and run rdc is fine…until that person logs off/out. Then hamachi’s not running any longer.

   why run anything as a service? so that it runs whether a user’s logged on or not. That way you can vpn in and out all you want.

4. chris on January 24th, 2006 4:42 pm
   

   Very good point, “joe”. I had finally figured out the appeal, but never got around to updating beyond the “[later]” bit in the article.

   I see advantages there if you expect a machine to reboot unattended I suppose. The more I think about it, I suppose that’s just about gotta be it.

   I’m a little slow, but I figure it out eventually!

5. » pingback » Solo Technology :: Blog Archive :: New server, Hamachi Linux on February 2nd, 2006 9:56 pm
   
   
6. » pingback » Hamachi as a Service Redux » Solo Technology on April 28th, 2007 6:31 am
   
   

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