If you are a small company, with its presence at different geographical locations, and you are worried about how to interconnect PCs available there, you can now have an easy solution. You don't have to spend huge sums buying networking hardware and software. Instead just a simple piece of software will do the trick. Welcome to Leaf Networks ^[1]. Leaf Networks allows you to create your own VPN using a simple download for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. This software installed on all the host and clients, allows you to set up a VPN and share just about any device over a network.

The Leaf 2006 client software uses "Out-of-Band TCP Signaling" to form a TCP connection between two computers running the Leaf 2006 client software. This out-of-band signaling is achieved by creating a control channel that is setup using the Leaf Peer Server and used to broker all the TCP signaling traffic. Once the TCP connection is formed, the control channel is torn down and there is a direct TCP connection between each computer.

However, I am still not sure about the security of the connection, and certainly will not advice you to transact sensitive data through such VPN. But for everyday transactions, which are not that commercially important, it can be given a try. The service has recently been officially launched. Till now, it was under its nine-month long beta phase, during which an estimated 25,000 registered users tested and grilled it.