What is happening with Hamachi VPN? Is there a better alternative?

Question

Development of Hamchi has stalled since Logmein bought them. I'm thinking I should look for an alternative, what works as well for a VPN that by passes firewalls you don't have control over, and works on both Windows and Linux and Is free or has a small one time cost.

Answer 1

Just about any true VPN solution won't by-pass firewalls on the in-coming side... (Where the VPN "server" sits)

Open VPN can run on windows, Linux etc. and is extrememly reliable, especially compared to IPSEC VPN.  

I have a client who is using VPN over a SATELLITE up/down link!  These satellite connections have notoriously bad lag time, making IPSEC almost impossible to implement, the Open VPN works flawlessly.  The same server that is handling incoming for half a dozen home users is also handling 3 "remote offices" each with a dedicated VPN connection as well as acting as their gateway/router to the internet and a fiber connection to another agency.  This same client has a 2nd Open VPN server (Seperate because this part of the agency requires FIPS compliance in their VPN solution) handling 15 mobile data terminals used in their police cars utilizing AT&T Cellular cards in the laptops, and one DARE officer in a high school with extremely tightened-down security going through a proxy server (had to default the DARE officer to TCP instead of the more efficient UDP protocol).

I haven't found a situation yet where you can't get a stable connection.

(If you have to have FIPS level security, it's a bit of a PITA to set up, since you will most likely have to compile the FIPS module seperately... and un-install the non-FIPS compliant OpenSSL modules that will likely already be installed on the system.  I didn't have too much problem with gentoo, except until I got all the install locations in the correct spots, SSH wouldn't start up, and when I was doing this I was using an SSH session to connect to the server.)