Public service announcement

[major-error.livejournal.com]

For the lazy geek in everyone here, there's a "fun little toy" that provides VPN-like capabilities that I'm sure will come in handy.

This worthy tool is called Hamachi
In brief, it allows you to make non-local networked PCs part of a private network with a minimum of effort.  It creates a virtual network connection that co-exists with (and piggy-backs on) your existing network connection without disruption/redirection.

As a practical example, I am browsing shares on my home PC (behind a Coyote Linux firewall) from work (firewalled out the wazoo, too).  Certainly beats messing around FTP...

Free!  For Windows and Linux (OS X client in-progress)
That is all...

Comments

[necessitysslave.livejournal.com]

I bet that my work won't like it if I tried to install that one. (even more wouldn't like it if I succeeded though that's not very likely without more permissions than I have on these Pc's)

[kostika.livejournal.com]

Hmmm..that could be very useful.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Ya. It'd be nice to have something that worked off a web page, so that it could work even if all writes to disk were controlled, workstation software reimaged every night and unknown EXEs disallowed from running. A PC running IE and/or a language/script interpreter (Perl, Python etc) should have enough flexibility to weasel something through.

About the only problem I can forsee is one we have at work - by default, all internet access is whitelist-only. Email is handled using non-POP/SMTP clients, internal servers and a conversion gateway, web pages are limited to port 80 and the cross-checked server/IP whitelists (minus any URLs which match certain regexes), port 53 requests are handled internally, and ping and traceroute can't make it past our firewall. And all packets are tracked and traced, with scanners looking for odd addresses and high activity. We're locked up tighter than an eel's ass.

And yes, there are severe internal policies about creating a connection between a PC on the LAN and the outside world via modem, WiFi etc. Severe as in "security will be clearing out your desk now".

Oddly enough, there's no real policy against bringing in your own PC and surfing from it (as long as it never touches the internal LAN). Although all the phone lines are fry-your-modem digital and you'd be lucky to get a local wireless signal of any kind, so it's kind of moot. Maybe if your desk overlooked the car park and you had a hotspot and satellite dish in your car... and a manager who wasn't on your back all the time about why you were websurfing instead of working :)

[necessitysslave.livejournal.com]

that sounds slightly more rabid than my workplace.
I'll have to pass this to be looked at by a sysadmin friend of mine see what he thinks...

[hiroe.livejournal.com]

This looks quite interesting; but unfortunately they do not support 98SE.

[kelly-bean.livejournal.com]

cool.

Thanks for the link :)

[jecook]

FWIW, Neither does M$ anymore.

and the latest WMF worm going around will NOT be patched for 9x from what I understand, in order to "encourage" those stragglers to bite the damm bullet and buy a newer machine that will run something a bit more modern. Seriouly, the OS is almost 10 years old, and has had three operating systems come out after it.

At least no one is using 3.1 anymore. Those folks need to do a forklift upgrade, because it's not 2000 compliant...

[belovedcrown.livejournal.com]

holy crap, where do you work with such stringent security? the pentagon isn't even that tight.

[hiroe.livejournal.com]

Actually, most of the machines i use 98SE on are capable of running XP. I simply choose not to.

No, i'm not going to get into the Great OS Debate here. (That said, 98 has a bit more life to it than you give it credit for.)

[ihateemo.livejournal.com]

Well, enjoy 10 years ago, luddite!

[hiroe.livejournal.com]

No need to be insulting, thanks. We all have our reasons for what we do.

[jecook]

There are valid reason for still running windows 98. a lot of the old games which we love just won't run on 2000/XP properly, and there are either no patches to make them work, or just plain are not supported. (or the company that wrote it is no more. Starship Titanic is a wonderful example of this.)

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Government, but not the American one :)

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

I think hiroe'd be more likely to enjoy an OS that doesn't suck up hundreds of megs of RAM and choke a mid-strength CPU, has had over seven years of testing by hundreds of millions of end-users, and has had millions of pieces of software written for it (most of which are now free or super-cheap). And runs DOS games natively.

[redqueenmeg.livejournal.com]

YA RLY. I contract for the American government and uh.

Yeah, it isn't like that.

[hiroe.livejournal.com]

Another problem is that with XP, when i'm editing/cataloguing my photographic exploits (link to sample here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/hiroe/105455.html)), i can crash explorer in under a minute.