Hamachi is convenient as it has brokered VPN through a firewall over which I have no control or input (I’m not breaking any rules though, just can’t rely of the building IT guy to do any port work for me). But Hamachi is only connecting at 300k-ish which just isn’t working for me. I’ve done some troubleshooting but couldn’t find anything that was helping (and I’ve been on hold with hamachi tech support for 28 minutes now and counting) - some people reported that turning on timestamps helped OSx - windows performance but windows to windows doesn’t seem to make much of a difference either way.
If there are other VPN solutions available that:
- Are cheap/free (Hamachi is $39/year or something like that)
- Preferably brokered - I’d rather not have to set up a negotiation server on a home network but if I really have to then I will
- Provides good (defined by me to > 2Mb/s) connection speeds
then I would love to hear about them.
Thanks
What protocol are you using over hamachi? FTP is much more efficient than windows file sharing or AFP for that matter.
When you look at the peer details, are they relayed or are you directly connected?
What units are you using, the difference between KB and Kb is an order of magnitude. A typical broadband connection can only upload at 125KB/s (1 megabit per second), so that would be a bottleneck no matter what solution you use.
You didn’t give much information on who’s involved on the other end. Is this your house, clients, friends, another work site etc? It makes a difference on how much control you have for the other side.
If it were my house, I’d buy an ASA 5505 and do client based SSL vpn.
Besides that, Hamachi can cut through your session at layer 7, I wouldn’t touch that service with a 10 foot pole.
Most likely the ports hamachi needs to setup a tunnel are blocked, that’s why it’s in relay mode
The best way to ensure you do get a full speed VPN connection is just to run a VPN server of some kind at home, neorouter has a server you can run on a windows computer and it’s easy to set up, you’ll just need to forward the port it uses through your home router
Using files sharing. Kb/sec.
Weirdly, it seems to be something specifically between my home and the office - between a third computer and the office I was at about 1Mb/sec, between a third computer and the home I was at about 1Mb/sec, but between office and home I’m at about 1/3 of that speed.
I can set something up at my house - unlimited access and control there.
So you are using windows file sharing (SMB)? How are you measuring your speeds and getting bits per second? the windows dialog always reports speeds in bytes. Pretty sure OSX does as well, though I haven’t used it in a long time.
Did you check to see if you are being relayed? If you are directly connected, it’s likely a protocol issue with SMB. It’s really not terribly predictable or efficient over the internet unless you are going from windows 8 to windows 8 or server 2012 (SMBv3).
Installing something like filezilla server and using FTP would probably get you your speed back if thats the case.
If you are being relayed, port forwarding (or enabling upnp) on either side should fix that.
So the other side is your house? I’d do an SSL vpn probably.
Not being relayed. Hamachi support said that something unusual is happening and are going to research and get back to me.
My house is one of the other sides - I’m trying to get things working for a half dozen people or so to be able to use everything.
Ah gotcha. Not sure client vpn would be good for.games and such of its for that. You could distribute usernames for your friends if it’s for something like that. I’m sure there are better alternatives for gaming like hamachi.
This is for work mainly - don’t need gaming performance, just don’t like waiting so long to schlep files around
Shoot, even clientless web based vpn would be good then.