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Other Tips, Tricks and Tutorials

Setting Up a Virtual Private Network with Hamachi

Play games or share files just like on a regular LAN.

By Mihai Marinof, Linux Editor

19th of October 2006, 08:08 GMT

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Having only an internal LAN IP has been a long known problem as not everyone can forward their needed ports on the network router. Because your computer doesn't have a unique Internet IP, you can't enjoy for instance, gaming with a friend in the same situation. Hamachi enables you and your friends to setup a virtual network where you can enjoy direct connectivity with no port limits. When the network setup is complete, every network client will be assigned an internal IP, accessible from any PC in that network.


Installation

Download:

# wget http://files.hamachi.cc/linux/hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx.tar.gz

Uncompress:

# tar xfz hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx.tar.gz

Install:

# cd hamachi-0.9.9.9-20-lnx
# make install


Logging
In

Run the tuncfg daemon:

# tuncfg

Initializing Hamachi which will generate the RSA keypair and create a config file:

# hamachi-init
Initializing Hamachi configuration (/root/.hamachi). Please wait ..

generating 2048-bit RSA keypair .. ok
making /root/.hamachi directory .. ok
saving /root/.hamachi/client.pub .. ok
saving /root/.hamachi/client.pri .. ok
saving /root/.hamachi/state .. ok

Start Hamachi:

# hamachi start
Starting Hamachi hamachi-lnx-0.9.9.9-20 .. ok

Set your nickname:

# hamachi set-nick your.nick.here
Setting nickname .. ok

Login to Hamachi network:

# hamachi login
Logging in ....>....... ok

You are now logged into the Hamachi network. As you can see, a new virtual interface, ham0, has been created and was assigned a unique virtual IP. Now, it's time to either create or join a network.

Create a network:

# hamachi create your.network.name your.network.passwd
Creating your.network.name .. ok

Make your network visible to others:

# hamachi go-online your.network.name
Going online in your.network.name .. ok

To join an already created network:

# hamachi join some.network.name network.passwd
Joining some.network.name .. ok

Make yourself visible on the network:
# hamachi go-online some.network.name
Going online in some.network.name .. ok

In order to see who is online on a network, either type:

# hamachi list

or use gHamachi, a front-end to console hamachi. It's written GTK and it's available for both versions 1.2 or 2:

GTK 1.2 (58k) gHamachi_gtk1.2.tar.gz
GTK 2 (53k) gHamachi_gtk2.tar.gz

To run, simply unzip and execute the binary file. You will need to have hamachi set up and started.

Good luck!


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User opinions:


Comment #1 by: BaltikaTroika on 21 Oct 2006, 00:46 GMT reply to this comment

I absolutely love coming to Softpedia.org every day to see what new software is out there for me to play with on my OpenSuse based system. :)

I've never heard much about Hamachi, so after reading about it on this site, decided to give it a go. Probably about 40 minutes after downloading it, I had two of my computers (on a LAN) zipping files to each other through Hamachi.

Here are a couple thoughts:

1. Thanks again for another great spotlight article on an interesting piece of software!

2. When installing Hamachi, make sure you RTFM first! :) The instructions in the softpedia article are sufficient to get up and running, but there are two more in-depth (one is simple, the other very thorough) walkthroughs. Go to the Hamachi site, click to enter the forums, go into the HowTo area, then find the linux HowTo. Pay attention to when they use sudo.

3. Beware! Hamachi is free (no cost), but not open source!! You'll be trusting any information you send through Hamachi to the developers, who do not allow others to look through the source code. Are there backdoors? Anything else that could be troubling? Nobody other than the developers has any idea. If you don't mind this, go ahead and use the software. If you feel better using an open source alternative, they are available.

In short, I found it quite easy to get this up and running with the HowTo and article guiding me. It works quite well, although I've only tried networking with NFS.

If you like playing with new kinds of software, give this a try! There's even a nice little gui (ghamachi) available that makes everything quite easy.

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