Replacement for Hamachi for SVN access

Question

My company has been using Hamachi to access our SVN repository for a number of years. We are a small yet widely distributed development team with each programmer in a different country working from home. The server is hosted by a non-techie in our central office. Hamachi is useful here since it has a GUI and supports remote management.

This system worked well for a while, but recently I have moved to a country with poor internet speeds. Hamachi will no longer connect 99% of the time - instead I get a "Probing..." message that doesn't resolve. It's certain to be a latency issue, as the same laptop will connect without problems when I cross the border and connect using a different ISP with better speeds.

So I really need to replace Hamachi with some other VPN/protocol that handles latency better. The techie managing the repository is not comfortable installing and configuring Apache or IIS, so it looks like HTTP is out. I tried to convince my boss to go for a web hosting company, but he doesn't trust a 3rd party with our source.

Any other recommended options / experiences out there for accessing our SVN repos that would be as simple as Hamachi for setup; but be more tolerant of network latency issues?

Answer 1

First I should ask why you need a VPN in the first place. Subversion can operate over HTTPS, so as long as you open the proper port on the server there shouldn't be any security or connectivity issues.

Assuming that you do need a VPN, I find it difficult to believe that an administrator uncomfortable with Apache would be more comfortable installing a whole new VPN system (much more complicated and tricky, in my estimation).

Answer 2

Perhaps it's a bit much to ask of your team, but if you have a distributed team then you could switch to a distributed version control system (eg. Mercurial or Git). These don't need to use the network so much and you won't suffer from latency problems. It is an entirely new paradigm though and your team's development processes will have to change, so you might not consider it appropriate in your case.