IT debris

LogMeIn Hamachi on Fedora 17

· Remy

Warning! Out of date content.

I needed a quick and secure way to log in remotely to a machine running Fedora 17 from Windows and Linux clients.

The solution I chose was Hamachi which I have used in the past to manage the occasional Windows box. It is free (for a maximum of a few clients), quite easy to setup and works through typical home nat setups without having to configure port-forwarding.

Warning: LogMeIn Hamachi is a proprietary centrally-managed VPN system.

Setup your LogMeIn environment:

  • First create a (free) LogMeIn account if you haven’t got one.
  • Log on to your account and add a network in control-panel.
  • Configure the network so you have to approve all new joiners to this network.
  • If you dont want to approve new-joiners you can rely on assigning a password to the network. You can also require both approval and a password.
  • Take note of the network id, you will need this later.

Configure Linux:

The Linux Hamachi client is currently a beta and console only. To complete the next steps you need a root shell.

On the Fedora machine you download the rpm installation package from the LogMeIn Labs.

Hamachi assumes your system is Linux Standard Base (LSB) 3.0 compliant in its start/stop scripts so make sure your machine is LSB compatible. You can do this by installing the required package(s) with:

yum install redhat-lsb-core

This will download and install the lsb-core functions and all of the dependencies. If the packages are already in place yum will tell you.

Install the hamachi rpm package with yum. For example:

yum install logmein-hamachi-2.1.0.86-1.x86_64.rpm

Starting and configuring the VPN:

Next step is to start your vpn with:

/etc/init.d/logmein-hamachi start

or

service logmein-hamachi start

With chkconfig logmein-hamachi on and chkconfig logmein-hamachi off you can control the starting of the VPN at system boot.

The first time you have to manually login hamachi with:

hamachi login

After which you can assign a nick for your machine so the other peers see a client name.

hamachi set-nick <nickname>

You can find your IPv4 and / or IPv6 addresses by issueing ip a of ifconfig and looking for a ham interface. Most of the time your VPN interface will be called ham0.

Connecting to the network:

Connect the client to the network you created in your LogMeIn control panel. If you configured the network with a password you run join followed by the network id after which you enter the network password.

hamachi join <network id>

If you configured the network to have you approve new peers you run do-join followed by the network id. Enter the password if you have configured one for the network, if you didn’t just hit the enter button.

hamachi do-join <network id>

Go back to your LogMeIn control panel and approve the new peer for the network.

To list the other network members run:

hamachi list

In my case the network is called experiment and there is another Linux box with the nick laptop connected:

[123-456-789]experiment  capacity: 2/5, subscription type: Free  
987-654-321   laptop                25.xxx.xxx.xxx       alias: not set

Conclusion:

And that is basically all you need to get running. You can find a lot of information in the README located in /opt/logmein-hamachi/README.