So what is NeoRouter?
For me personally the sand timer has been running on Hamachi for some time. Its support for different platforms doesn’t do it for me anymore, especially with respect to FreeBSD and Linux. The policy changes have also made it progressively more difficult for me as a personal user to rely upon it.
The problem was that for an incredibly long time there was nothing to replace it with that offered a similar functionality which was just as simple to use. Well unfortunately for Hamachi the last grain of sand has fallen to the bottom because I have found a suitable alternative. This week I will be replacing Hamachi with NeoRouter.
Without doing a full blow-by-blow comparison (because there is one here on the NeoRouter website) my reasons for switching are:
- NeoRouter will allow me to have up to 256 clients. This is a vast improvement on the 5 device limit per group with Hamachi.
- FreeBSD Support. Incredibly important now I’m so heavily into the greatness that is FreeNAS.
- Linux Support. Whilst Hamachi did have this it was utterly awkward and unusable.
- 32-bit and 64-bit versions for the Unix based operating systems.
- Android Support. Software support like this is what normally gives me pause for thought when contemplating moving away from my reliable iPhone.
- ARM version under development. This could be incredibly useful if the RaspberryPi continues to increase in popularity.
- OpenWrt and Tomato router firmwares support NeoRouter being installed.
- Controlable central server. You run a server, you connect your clients to the server, it works.
Having had NeoRouter in place for some months now I’ve had no reason to look back. It’s time to ditch Hamachi folks!
Did you ever get NeoRouter working on FreeNAS? From what I’ve read it’s not very straightforward 🙁
Really cannot remember if I had any success or not Jeff. Will need to give it another try and see what happens.
I don’t get it. You need to run a “server”, which I assume needs to be on a fixed ip? Why on earth, would you not just use OpenVPN or similar then?
I found that the biggest strength of Hamachi, was that two devices with a dynamic IP could talk to each other (via the hamachi-provided static ip).
Because this is much simpler than OpenVPN in my experience, you don’t have to configure routes, etc. Neorouter also does the same dynamic to static trick that was so useful with Hamachi.