Hamachi is a piece of software that belongs to the very rare category “Double-click to install and it works”. If you ever wanted to build a “private” VPN, take Hamachi into consideration.
“Hamachi is fast, secure and simple. It is also free.” The client is available for Windows and Linux.

The Hamachi website describes how it works:
“Hamachi is a UDP-based virtual private networking system. Its peers utilize the help of a 3rd node called mediation server to locate each other and to boot strap the connection between themselves. The connection itself is direct and once it’s established no traffic flows through our servers.”

The installation procedure is very easy:
In short: download, double-click, join or create a network, invite your friends, done.

After install you’ve got a new network adapter with a 5.x.x.x IP attached to it. Now you can create a “Network” (optionally with a password) and start inviting your friends to join your network. After inviting your friends your see their IP addresses in the “contact window”. It’s now possible to ping them, browse their files or whatever. You can only ping the IP addresses that are in your network / contact list.

The great thing about Hamachi is that it works with almost any network configuration. It doesn’t matter if your behind a firewall or nated. Hamachi is also secure. The complete traffic between the peers is SSL encrypted.

Most people use Hamachi to play multiplayer games using the VPN.
I use Hamachi to grant my friends access to the Apache virtual hosts that are running on my development machine.

The only disadvantage of Hamachi is that the mediation-server is not available. That’s why I only use it for “private” things. To connect to my companies network I’m using OpenVPN which is also quite comfortable.

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