Thought I’d give a shout-out to the makers of LogMeIn (http://logmein.com), who have come up with a useful free version of a product which turns out to be more handy than my previous option (a combination of DynDNS, VNC, and fiddling with routers). In the span of 3 months, I went from not using it at all to having more than a dozen systems on it.  (It even has a Mac version, in beta, which I can use to remote-control my media-laden MacMini.)

About two years ago, I tried to get Hamachi working — that was the original project by this company, so far as I know. Frankly I was left a little baffled, and ended up using the old standby, OpenVPN.  However, compared to Hamachi-of-two-years-ago, LogMeIn is wonderfully slick.

I foresee a time when I’ll be using its Rescue, Pro, and Backup versions — there are situations appropriate for those kinds.  (Pro allows you to locally print off a remote program; Rescue lets you help people remotely without an install; Backup does what backup implies — competitor to Mozy?)  But for now, LogMeIn is good enough to keep me from exploring further VNC, PCAnywhere, Connect, Remote Desktop, SharedView, WebEx, or Glance.  In the future, those will surely become part of the mix.