I agree with this request too, and not just for customer support. It also helps authorized individuals to securely overcome difficulties in (perhaps understandably) rigid IT physical/configuration/procedural infrastructure. If the IT support people consider a static IP and port forwarding be jerry-rigging, risking the stability and security of the entire network (and that's what one IT support company recently told me!), then no Radmin without changing IT support companies, which is a huge pain just to get superior remote control.

But if Radmin could harmlessly tunnel out, or use existing tunnels (Skype, Google Talk, AIM/Pidgin, etc.), then it'd be much easier to get it administratively approved since it would have no network support/infrastructure changes required.

But I leave it to Famatech to determine the feasibility of this--even while repeating that I hope they do this ASAP. I know people who'd try Radmin TODAY were this in place.

I saw those notes and that pinned Tech support note, but in a sense it'd be unfortunate to have to use Hamachi, installing a persistent layer of stuff and setting up a redundant level of encryption.

Also, as I recall, Hamachi was starting to place significant new limits on the free version, though I have not pursued just what those limits are, or their impact. I wonder if they will eventually pull the free version.

But in the meantime, I guess it works.

Does going through a Hamachi layer hurt performance, I wonder?

I also wonder, do people have much success with EchoVNC? Not sure if it would have a performance impact.

I'm not sure if it's any different. (Helpful, I know.)

I think basically all we need is a way to dynamically poke a hole in the firewall, as needed, and despite dynamic changes in IP address and router config.

This is done by piggybacking on allowed traffic to establish a connection that the router/firewall has no problem with, and then use it for Radmin (or Skype, or Google Talk, or whatever).

Hamachi adds encryption to the mix. If one deactivates Radmin encryption, and assuming one ends up with a direct peer-to-peer connection (i.e., not through the Hamachi servers except to establish the initial link, but expressly not for ongoing traffic), the performance may be very similar. Or not.

Some time I perhaps I'll be able to test this, but I still don't like the idea of having to give the naive user one more thing to worry about or log in to, nor do I want to have an ongoing live connection between the two machines (client and server) in question.

But I'm still open to the possibility that this is the best approach, at least for the short- to medium-term. Maybe long-term.

Anyone out there have experience using Hamachi for this reason? Has it hurt performance? Any of the Radmin support people care to chime in?

FYI John

Just tried Hamachi and it's quite neat.

I had a bit of a mare installing it but I think that was a problem at my end. The install hung and I had to manually uninstall the network driver and hack out the registry entries before it would let me reinstall. It's okay now. But I haven't heard any horror stories about it on here so I do think it was just a glitch at this end. I installed it on a second machine and it went on fine.

Configuration is fairly straightforward. Is it any easier than setting up a port forward? No, not for me, but then I know what I'm doing with my router. But at least if you go down the hamachi route then as the support person there is only one set of instructions to work with.

The current licensing is free for non-commercial use. The link from the pinned post on the Troubleshooting forum isn't to the latest version. It's to an earlier one which I think was on a different license - so I'm not sure if the "old" link is deliberate.

However hamachi performs very poorly over my (admittedly very naff 0.5 Mb) broadband connection. Considering I've effectively only got half of that because both of the hamachi test machines are this side of the router it's hardly surprising. However at least TeamViewer VPN worked after a fashion - hamachi continually drops the connection.

Radmin aside I actually really like hamachi as a product. You can set up your own multiple VLANs and you have a lot of control over access, network groups and configuration. So I'm definitely going to hang on to it just for the VPN.

One neat feature of hamachi relating to earlier posts on this thread is that you can turn off encryption on a per VLAN basis. I tried doing this and although I think performance was improved, it still wasn't enough to allow hamachi to maintain the connection.

So as a VPN for Radmin use then TeamViewer VPN (also free for non-commercial) has the edge for me, but that's only because of my naff connection.

But as a product hamachi wins easily from what I've seen, and for most people I'm sure it's just fine for Radmin use. But as you say, it's one more potentially unnecessary thing to have to worry about.

Bottom line then - I'd still like to see a lightweight VPN built into Radmin!

Ooh, I like the sound of that!

And also, I certainly understand if this is a 4.0 feature instead. It'll just hurt, since I haven't personally used most of my 3.X licenses. (But I'm a very odd duck in that respect, I realize. And other respects, some would say. )