Originally Posted by
nmenaker
to the credit of haimaichi, they trick the router, or spoof a port forward, so it just works. This is a great benefit when dealing with people remotely, who don't know how to configure their router for PF and RA port fowarding.
What Hamiachi is really doing is using a their server in the mix. Since its both close source and relies on an external service you are not in complete control.
I think its a neat solution, amazingly elegant even. But I'd still rather open some ports and know that what is going on is under my control.
That being said, things like OpenVPN arn't the easiest to setup, so I think as long as you are comfortable with Hamiachi then its a good solution.
The other thing to remember is that (unless they've changed this) you cannot route all your traffic through Hamiachi. In otherwords, it may give you a secure connection back into your network, but as your surfing on the remote box you are still using what ever LAN you are on. To me, the most compelling feature of any VPN solution is the ability to tunnel all of your traffic and (if configured right) effectively remove you from the local LAN. That protects not only your traffic but keeps your computer off the local lan and away from would-be attackers. I guess one option would be to use a good software firewall with Hamiachi, then connect back to a VNC or remote desktop server on your network and surf from there.... but that seems a little slow and kludgy to me.