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Show HN: Lynk – Securely expose local TCP and HTTP services to the web

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Re: Show HN: Lynk – Securely expose local TCP and HTTP services to the web

#21

Post by billyhoffman »

loopholelabs wrote: post #17
billyhoffman wrote: post #15

I want to be supportive, and I believe this solves a real issue, but this giving me serious pause: > We take security very seriously, especially when it comes to our users. This is why we offer end-to-end SHA-256 encryption You take security seriously, but are confusing pretty basic and fundamental concepts of encrypting vs hashing. Given that the point of this service to expose local services to the internet, and on…

This was a mistake on our website, which as since been removed. 1. We'll be open sourcing our client in the coming weeks so you can check out our code yourselves. 2. We will be offering a self-hosted version which will decouple you entirely from our infrastructure and you can provide you own SSL certificates. 3. Lynk can forward traffic to your encrypted services - which of course would mean losing out on compression…

Thank you, this is helpful.

You could use this "for dev" and "for prod" as a marketing/business opportunity. Distinct bullets points of use cases in "For Dev" and "For Prod" sections. For prod there are also add-on options that would not make sense for dev, and could provide additional value (custom support, pre-built packages for distros, analytics on traffic/usage analytics about the tunneled services, etc)

Good Luck

Re: Show HN: Lynk – Securely expose local TCP and HTTP services to the web

#22

Post by tptacek »

loopholelabs wrote: post #18
tptacek wrote: post #14

The standard answer to this problem is ngrok, so it'd be useful to have a direct comparison. I couldn't find any encryption code in the Github repos you have exposed (I didn't look hard); obviously, since you've documented "SHA-256 encryption", you should probably write that up a lot better. I assume that at least the client side of this will be open source, in that people are going to be squeamish about running clos…

Hi! I've written an analysis of Lynk's performance vs. Ngrok here: https://medium.com/@shivanshvij/building-a-better-ngrok-dbc1... and our documentation stating "SHA-256 Encryption" has been since removed as a mistake. The client side will absolutely be open sourced probably by the end of next week once I've cleaned up some spaghetti code.

It might be a good idea to make that post or something like it way more prominent.

Re: Show HN: Lynk – Securely expose local TCP and HTTP services to the web

#23

Post by jhgg »

This product offering is a bit confusing. Not that I don't get the offering - but that the marketing around it confuses me.

It's designed for forwarding applications for development purposes? But then why the in-depth monitoring and alerting (something that seems to imply a production system might be running on top of this.)

The "meaning your website performance won't take a hit no matter where your users are" doesn't really make sense in this context either. My "users" are hopefully my coworkers/the client I'm demoing to. And if I'm tunneling up my site over wifi from my laptop, a "highly available" and "globally distributed" load balancer setup really doesn't make sense, nor is it relevant for the development use-case.

And if it's "6x more performant" than ngrok- is that really relevant if you're using it for a trivial amount of traffic in a development environment? Why is this a selling point to me?

Further - if I'm tunneling TCP, does "end to end" really matter? If I'm tunneling something that's not encrypted on my application (let's say a plaintext redis connection) the link between this service and the person connecting to the tunnel is still unencrypted. Which means the whole "end to end" marketing really doesn't make much sense - unless of course I don't trust the network I'm running on - but for some reason maybe trust the network the person accessing the tunnel is on (super unlikely situation...)

The example also irks me - exposing a database directly to the internet (if it's a database for development, hopefully - it's probably fine?)

Is this trying to compete with ngrok, or something like Cloudflare's Argo tunnels? Because the marketing material leads me in two different directions, which is pretty confusing.

Re: Show HN: Lynk – Securely expose local TCP and HTTP services to the web

#24

Post by momothereal »

I echo the sentiments that the features you promote seem overkill for the "primary use-case" of local development.

On another note I suggest you improve the accessibility of your pages. The contrast of the text in the navigation bar and on the FAQ page makes it hard to read, and is below the WCAG standards.

Re: Show HN: Lynk – Securely expose local TCP and HTTP services to the web

#25

Post by carlosdp »

If I can just offer one bit of feedback, if you just type any email and password in the "Sign in / Register" page, it just creates an account for you if it doesn't exist.

There's a ton of reasons you don't want that, and should probably have a separate "sign up" flow for email/password login. Here's a few:

1. It's not at all clear you can actually do that. One guy in the comments below thinks you can only sign up using Github/Gitlab/etc.

2. Many of us have multiple emails, what if I don't remember what email I used for your service? Every time I try the wrong one, it'll just create a separate account, and it'll take me a few minutes to realize this isn't my account, but I just created a new one.

3. No double "password confirmation". Some sites skip this step now, so I guess it's not required, but not having it is part of why people will think this isn't a sign up field.

Re: Show HN: Lynk – Securely expose local TCP and HTTP services to the web

#26

Post by ignoramous »

loopholelabs wrote: post #2

Hi Hackernews, We're excited to announce that the Lynk Beta is now live! We've been hard at work building out Lynk's tunnelling protocols to make them faster, more stable, and all around better. We're happy to announce that vs. Ngrok our tunnels perform up to 6 times faster (source: https://medium.com/@shivanshvij/building-a-better-ngrok-dbc1... ) and support technologies such as HTTP/2 (with HTTP1 fallback) and Webs…

This is great. Congratulations on the launch. It reminds me of DERP [0].

A few questions:

1. What are the top few things in the protocol that improved speed upto 6x in comparison to ngrok?

2. Is Lynk based on your earlier work on Parasite?

3. The website claims "CDN-like performance" with "highly-available load-balancers" over the tunnel, and so:

3a. Is the limit on number of connections (100 to 200 per minute) a soft limit? Can it be raised? If so, by how much?

3b. Do you have servers across the globe like CDNs do? Or, plan to?

4. I see a flat $5 fee for enterprise usage and a notice about "no tricks pricing"... Is bandwidth something you monitor for "fair-use" and might charge extra for? Or, is bandwidth simply unlimited?

5. "Lynk Web UI for Request Capture and Playback" Neat. And so:

5a. This works for both TCP and HTTP? Any video/screencast that shows this in action?

5b. Is the HTTP tunnel a reverse-proxy or in fact a HTTP CONNECT tunnel or something else?

5c. Does TCP tunnel over SSH? Or HTTP? Or both? Or neither?

5d. How do you deal with TCP over TCP performance issues, if at all: https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle/blob/master/docs/how-it...

You might want to update the FAQ section of your website. It seems to be out-of-date.

Thanks.

[0] https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/tree/master/derp

Re: Show HN: Lynk – Securely expose local TCP and HTTP services to the web

#27

Post by cachestash »

I honestly don't see the use of this. Why would anyone want to expose a development environment to the internet, especially in the age of devops and reproducible environments. 98% of all my development happens over 127.0.0.1 now. I have zero need to expose a service when I can replicate multi sites on a lan with the lightweight environment given to me with containers and vms.

Re: Show HN: Lynk – Securely expose local TCP and HTTP services to the web

#28

Post by jedieaston »

cachestash wrote: post #27

I honestly don't see the use of this. Why would anyone want to expose a development environment to the internet, especially in the age of devops and reproducible environments. 98% of all my development happens over 127.0.0.1 now. I have zero need to expose a service when I can replicate multi sites on a lan with the lightweight environment given to me with containers and vms.

If you are working on someone and want to show a friend, or if you want to open a project on another device that isn’t necessarily on the same network. And you don’t have to pay for a droplet or setup a PaaS if you’re in the middle of the nitty gritty of development.

Re: Show HN: Lynk – Securely expose local TCP and HTTP services to the web

#30

Post by kelnos »

cachestash wrote: post #27

I honestly don't see the use of this. Why would anyone want to expose a development environment to the internet, especially in the age of devops and reproducible environments. 98% of all my development happens over 127.0.0.1 now. I have zero need to expose a service when I can replicate multi sites on a lan with the lightweight environment given to me with containers and vms.

One of the original popular use cases for services like this was if you're developing against a third-party service that wants to send you webhooks.

But it's also useful if you want to run something locally and show it to a friend or co-worker. The co-worker bit is especially useful now with people working from home.

Regardless, this space is pretty crowded, so I'm not sure what a new offering could do to differentiate. I'm skeptical of their "6x faster than ngrok" claim, and even if it is true, I don't think this is a use case where that metric really matters all that much.

(Full disclosure: the founder of ngrok is a friend of mine, so I'm certainly biased here.)

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