Hamachi as a Service Redux

Posted on April 28, 2007 No Comments

There was a time, over a year ago, that I didn’t really “get” why folks wanted to run Hamachi as a Windows service. Not long afterwards, I figured it out after a spontaneous reboot. I “got it” rather quickly when I couldn’t reconnect.

As a quick reminder, Hamachi is software that allows you to very easily setup VPN connections to collections of machines. (previous Hamachi mentions)

Those two posts generate a lot of search engine traffic. I’m still not totally sure why…

Why bring this up? Well, these days I’m using multiple machines for work. I have all my heavy duty stuff loaded up on a spiffy desktop and I still have my trusty ol’ laptop as well. The laptop had been acting rather flaky, but a fresh install seems to have settled it down. I’ve not loaded it with tons of apps and tend to just use it from home and the data-center to RDC or VNC to my desktop or other servers.

With two machines, Hamachi became much more interesting to me again. I like the security and I like the flexibility. I also became more interested in the service aspect of it all, primarily for my desktop at the office. Why? We had a long power outage at the office in the middle of the night earlier this week. Long enough to outlast the UPS under my desk. There were other issues related to that outage, but until I drove in, I couldn’t check on anything as I’d lost my Hamachi tunnel when my machine powered back up.

That sucked.

Some poking around on the Hamachi forums turned up ServiceEx and the ServiceEx Hamachi service client. Sure, you can do this with srvany and instsrv, but this is dead simple and quick — two of my favorite things. Just download the installer and run it.

Problem solved.

Now to figure out why my connection degrades over time on my home machine running OneCare. I’m sure I need to tweak the OneCare firewall; I just haven’t nailed down what to tweak yet. Fortunately, my work laptop and desktop don’t have this issue. But my home monitor is bigger/higher ratio than my laptop — so I have incentive to get this sorted out!

Tags: hamachi, onecare, RDC, remote-desktop, service, vpn