I am a graduate student with a home office, WHS, mobile broadband with ATT and spend much of my time on campus or away from the house. To keep connected to the WHS and music, pictures, etc., I have been using Hamachi VPN for about 3 years now. The newest release, Hamachi 2, was not playing nicely with Windows 7 in the early beta days and once I learned others were having the same issues, I switched back to Hamachi 1.0.3.0. As I was on campus or the coffee shop my music began stuttering frequently and while checking the ping numbers noticed very high numbers--645ms was around the average. I was unable to use it over the mobile broadband as it was too slow. Also, I was experiencing a slowing of transfer speeds when connected to the local network when I was directly in front of the WHS. I was also not able to RDP into my WHS at times and I suspect Hamachi as the culprit due to subnet mismatches. It recognized the IP address but not the server name. I explain all of this so I don’t get the obvious answer of "Just use Hamachi, it works much better." I no longer think this is the case and believe there is now a greater difference in the free and premium Hamachi product. After seeing this post I decided to try it on my own and was pleasantly surprised how simple it was...at least almost. After testing it for the week my high ping times are now normal, I can listen to my music on any connection, etc. My only issue is my firewall must be disabled on my laptop (client) or it won't connect. As I believe I am going to go ahead and keep the setup, I need to know what rules to apply to make the change permanent. Any suggestions are appreciated? Thank you in advance. JohnJohn S.

What you're really asking is "How do I configure the firewall on Windows 7 to allow a VPN (PPTP) connection to a remote server?" It doesn't matter that the remote server is Windows Home Server, because you've already got the server and router configuration correct (you can make a connection when you turn off the Windows 7 firewall). So the Windows 7 forums will be a better location for getting an answer.I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)