Hamachi & GenControl - Work From Home!

I really don't want this to turn into solely a review blog. That said... Here's one more review for y'all!

Where I work, they have outsourced the administration of the WAN. Someone else is controlling the firewall, routers, etc. that connect all our buildings. I can have them make changes for me, and wait for them to get done -- or have my requests rejected due to some policy I didn't know about. Or I can take matters into my own hands.

Hamachi
Hamachi (recently purchased by LogMeIn uses P2P technology to create a secure VPN tunnel between computers. It features:

• NAT traversal


• Block ciphers and chaining modes


• Diffie-Hellman key exchange


• Public key encryption


• Message authentication codes

They are presenting it as a way to share files with friends, play LAN games over the Internet, and even IM through a secure network. I use it in conjunction with GenControl. (More on GenControl in a bit.)

Hamachi is not open source, but it is free. There is also a "Premium" version available for a cost which gives you more administrative control over your network and allows you to remove the security overhead if you cannot have any lag (i.e. gaming).

GenControl
GenControl remotely installs VNC on any computer where you have administrative access. It then removes VNC when you end the session. It's an open source offering from Gensortium. Using it with Hamachi, I can access my computer at work from home.

The problem with GenControl is that the screen refreshes are awful darn slow. Otherwise, this is a great system for patching my servers in the middle of the night without having to drive in to the office to do it!