Hamachi: Failed to connect to the engine

Yeri Tiete — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:35:49 +0100

After getting the Hamachi 2 update (without a prior notice, nicely done… No more auto update if they continue to break stuff) I started to notice a bunch of XPs receiving this error after a reboot: Failed to connect to the engine.

Hamachi is auto started, at boot, because we have a shortcut in the startup folder. No other way to auto start the free version (as far as I know).

Yet, when starting Hamachi manually after the PC had booted, there were no more errors. So it’s clear Hamachi tried to start before the engine (see services.msc -> LogMeIn Hamachi Engine or something) was started.

And reinstalling Hamachi only seemed to work on one of the XPs.

As there’s no easy way to delay the starting up of a program, I used some dirty vbs and batch… Kinda.

Here’s my solution:

Place both scripts in the Hamachi directory (c:\program files\logmein hamachi)

hamachiStart.vbs:

Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run chr(34) & ".\hamachi.bat" & Chr(34), 0
Set WshShell = Nothing

hamachi.bat:

@echo off
ping -n 30 127.0.0.1 >NUL
"C:\Program Files\LogMeIn Hamachi\hamachi-2-ui.exe"
exit

Hamachi.vbs will start the bat file. This seems to be the only way to prevent a command prompt from opening (and staying open all the time).

Hamachi.bat will ping itself for 30ish seconds (don’t think there’s a cleaner way to do this…) and then start the Hamachi GUI.

If you’re still having problems, increase 30 to something like 60 or even more.

Anyway, last thing you’ll need to do is to make a shortcut of hamachi.vbs, and drag it into the startup folder.

Reboot, wait a bit, and enjoy.

Logmein – Yeri Tiete

Hamachi: Failed to connect to the engine