Hey everyone,
I’d been struggling to find a good solution for how to set up my Asset Server for remote access, and I finally found a solution that works great and is free for up to 5 connections! There are plenty of solutions like no-ip and static IPs, but sometimes those aren’t an option because you don’t have control over your network. For instance, I work out of an incubator (co-working space), so an IT company runs the network and would charge like $45/month for a static IP. So, I started looking for alternatives and really didn’t come across anything good.
But, I finally found something that took less than 20 minutes to set up and it works great!
The trick: set up a VPN in a hub-and-spoke format with your asset server computer as the hub. How I did this:
- Go to http://www.logmein.com
- Sign up for a free account (or a pro trial or subscription, your choice)
- Look on the website for ‘Hamachi’, which is their VPN client.
- Register all computers you want to use with the asset server (including the server computer) on the Hamachi hub on logmein.com
- Set up a new network in hub-and-spoke format using the server computer as the hub
- Install the Hamachi client on all the computers including the server computer
- Once a connection is successfully established between your other computers and the hub (server) computer, your Hamachi client should show a green dot next to the connection to that computer
- If you’re successfully connected, simply use the IP address the Hamachi client gives you for your server computer as the asset server address.
That’s it! They offer a how-to for setting everything up if I missed any steps above, but honestly the website walks you through everything you’d need. This works perfectly for me because I have remote employees (and I work from home from time to time), and we’ve fought with other solutions that weren’t nearly as easy to implement or maintain as this.
I just wanted to share this with the community. because some of us less IT-savvy guys struggle with setting something like this up. You’re of course welcome to use any VPN client of your choosing that allows for hub-and-spoke virtual networks, but LogMeIn’s Hamachi is what I used and I know it works, so I’m sharing that.
Hope this is helpful to some people!
-Anthony