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Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

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Re: Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

#51
post #36

Or hire a static ip and expose whatever ports you feel like. Its amazing how far we've fallen from the internet of the 90s when you could get this done on most ISPs with all of a phone call.

Dynamic DNS is a good alternative. A free one I like is https://www.duckdns.org/

Or just doing a bit of research on which ISP provides static ips with the ability to serve continent. Not everything has to be Google scale.

Re: Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

#52
One of the thing I found missing is a lot of ngrok alternative is a web interface for viewing HTTP requests/responses when tunneling in HTTP/HTTPS mode, so I made a kinda hacky solution to this using cloudflared + mitmproxy: https://gist.github.com/maple3142/e46ab5ce8697476db13b4d9dc0...

Re: Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

#53
post #45
post #8

I maintain a list of similar tools here: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling I'm not sure there's a single class of software that's been implemented more times than ngrok-style tunneling. I keep finding more and more. Honestly it's a really fun exercise. Fairly challenging, but well within the reach of a single developer. I believe I'm currently working on my 5th incarnation.

I still haven’t found an ideal solution, despite a variety of options. Cloudflare tunnels are good, but Cloudflare terminates TLS certificates, and scans the traffic. People host on premise for privacy, which is moot if using Cloudflare. FRP is simple and works, but it takes inbound traffic from open Internet. A vulnerability in it could compromise your environment. The transport encryption is customized (probably us…

Can you clarify what you mean by inbound vs outbound? Pretty much all of these tools work the same way. You have a machine (usually a VPS) with a public IP address that runs the server, you connect to it with a client, and it tunnels traffic sent to the server to the client and other machines that would otherwise only be visible to the client.

There are several options on the list that do e2ee, including commercial services that likely have better pricing than ngrok. That said, I'm not aware of any that are marketed for high bandwidth usage such as video streaming. FWIW my 5th incarnation mentioned above will be such a service.

Re: Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

#54
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure there's a single class of software that's been implemented more times than ngrok-style tunneling. I keep finding more and more. AFAIK ngrok was the first widespread implementation of it, and there was such a sheer lack of it before that everyone started working on their own implementations at once and now we have an abundance. (At least that's my personal theory.)

I think "widespread" in this case means "marketed better". There were open source implementations before ngrok, whose founder even worked with someone who'd written one of those. (ngrok back then was certainly better than a lot of those other options, though.) Webhooks created the need for local tunneling software. Before ngrok, webhooks themselves were just starting to become more common. The need for local tunnelin…

It's an interesting market. Currently most (all?) offerings are targeted at the developer case, a la webhooks and request inspection. But I think in the future the more important use case (and much larger market) will be self hosting. That's going to require a lot more bandwidth.

Re: Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

#55
post #8

I maintain a list of similar tools here: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling I'm not sure there's a single class of software that's been implemented more times than ngrok-style tunneling. I keep finding more and more. Honestly it's a really fun exercise. Fairly challenging, but well within the reach of a single developer. I believe I'm currently working on my 5th incarnation.

I used your list recently, thanks! Ended up using boringproxy for my case.

Re: Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

#56

Is there any stand-alone open source version of the VS Code port forwarder? That’s what I really want. Not so much public access, just local access to ports on the remote machine that I can easily manage. SSH port forwards don’t work inside docker dev environments (and docker containers have to be rebuilt to export new ports natively), so some extra software is needed.

I haven't tried vscode forwarding. What features does it have that are missing from most of the options on the list[0]?

If you want a nice GUI for remote managing maybe check out one of my tools, boringproxy

[0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

Re: Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

#57

Note that server source code contains a feature to capture all traffic that you send over it: https://github.com/robbie-cahill/tunnelmole-service/blob/c58... I would only use the self-hosted version.

> ... server source code contains a feature ... I would only use the self-hosted version.

You shouldn't assume that a server which is ostensibly running code you can see is actually running that code without modifications.

That said, there is a difference between someone claiming (explicitly or implicitly) that they're not doing something, versus not making a claim, versus admitting they are doing it.

Re: Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

#58
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dynamic DNS is a good alternative. A free one I like is https://www.duckdns.org/

Or just doing a bit of research on which ISP provides static ips with the ability to serve continent. Not everything has to be Google scale.

Not sure what country you're in but in the US at least ISP options are rather limited in any given area. The two widest reaching (geographically) options, cell and Starlink, both use CGNAT as far as I know. Plus they're more limited in data usage.

Re: Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

#59

Also, Local Tunnel: https://localtunnel.github.io/www/

I tried to test this out. But got blocked when I visited my Public URL by some security warning page around phishing? Which is fair enough, but it wasn't clear to me how I could remove that and get the URL to point to my local server like I wanted. Also, their GitHub project has not been maintained for some time.

It's worth noting that if Tunnelmole becomes popular enough, you will also likely end up with people using it for phishing attacks, and your users will start getting phishing warnings. I recommend getting tunnelmole.net added to the Public Suffix List[0] which may help with this.

IMO it's not worth running a free tunneling service.

[0]: https://publicsuffix.org/

EDIT: I see in another thread that you've already gotten hit with phishing. I have some follow up questions I'll ask in that thread.

Re: Tunnelmole, an ngrok alternative (open source)

#60
post #11

Does it have the same spam prevention policies as ngrok?

In the early days there where several attempts to use Tunnelmole for phishing. When you think about it, a service that hides your IP under a domain that is not yours means you can do whatever you want without risking your own server or domain being taken down for abuse, instead risking my server. So I added code to forward an X-Forwarded-For header, which contains the real IP address of the client. Also random URLs h…

I know what the X-Forwarded-For is, but I'm confused by what you mean here. Can you go into a bit more detail as to what you implemented and how it prevents phishing?
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