Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 157 posts

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#31

Post by sneak »

sevg wrote: post #29
geoctl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I will definitely work on making the README more concise and hopefully more useful and easy to understand.

Your readme isn’t great, but I wouldn’t pay much attention to this guide that this person keeps posting. It’s way too long and excessively prescriptive, and the author goes too far with inserting their opinions (ie, don’t use github, don’t use discord etc.). I couldn’t possibly recommend this howto.

Oh, look, we both have opinions that we each believe are important. Imagine that. :)

I think this is the part where I’m supposed to tell third parties to disregard yours, but I’m not going to.

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#32

Post by geoctl »

maxmcd wrote: post #25
geoctl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit that the "next-gen" word might sound cheesy. As I said in the other reply, the more correct definition for Octelium is: a unified zero trust secure access platform. However, as I said this is a term that nobody would relate to. It's a ZTNA/BeyondCorp platform but not in the rigid sense. It's also a WireGuard/QUIC-based remote access VPN but it operates at layer-7 to provide L7 aware access control, secretless…

I think "no buzzwords" would be further in the direction of: "This software let's you set up peer to peer networking between your devices, expose them to the internet, run applications on them, view useful runtime information, and integrate easily with cloud providers and infrastructure you're familiar with."

Thank you. Octelium, however, does not operate as p2p and does not directly connect devices since that by itself contradicts the whole point of zero trust. It provides remote access to resources, or even sub-resources via L7 access control (e.g. allow access to some HTTP paths to some users based on identity/context/request content, etc...), not completely to "devices" or to complete subnets.

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#33

Post by gen6acd60af »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #3

The big thing to me about Tailscale is easy p2p connectivity. I think it looks like this doesn't do that and uses centralized router(s)?

>easy p2p connectivity

>centralized router(s)

When using Tailscale, your packets may be sent through centralized routers, FYI.

https://tailscale.com/kb/1257/connection-types

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#34

Post by sureglymop »

geoctl wrote: post #30
sureglymop wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue here is that while these terms may be very familiar to you (and to me personally also), they are not at all familiar to most people who will encounter your project. Thus, those people coming across your project may quickly overlook it instead of giving it a chance which is disappointing. By contrast, here is Tailscales tagline: "Fast, seamless device connectivity — no hardware, no firewall rules, no…

Thank you. I completely understand your point. But as mentioned in the other replies. Octelium is designed to be much more than just a VPN. It is not even tied to provide remote access to "devices" or resources behind NAT. It's zero trust architecture that's equally designed to provide access to internal resources and publicly protected resources such as SaaS APIs, databases, Kubernetes APIservers, SSH, etc... It pro…

But that's what I'm getting at. Even if it is much more, is all of that immediately relevant to a curious/potential new user?

I understand it may not be easy to narrow down the explanation, especially if you invested a lot of time and don't want to do a disservice to yourself by underselling it. Looking at the Tailscale tagline I quoted, it is small and ambiguous enough that it works marketing wise, regardless of all the features and solutions they offer. But it was just an example, I should maybe have used a totally different example of a product that is not in the same realm as yours.

The explanation you gave to me here is good but only because I vaguely know what all this jargon means. Try to think of a short simple sentence that a non-expert could understand.

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#37

Post by homarp »

cedws wrote: post #18

Definitely interested in an open source alternative to Tailscale. The README is way too verbose though. It should explain the project at a glance and have links to docs for the details.

headscale is an open source alternative to tailscale:

https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

Re: Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

#39

Post by pelagicAustral »

drexlspivey wrote: post #11
geoctl wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd appreciate if you could provide me a list of those buzzwords so that I can improve the readme.

“A next-gen FOSS self-hosted unified zero trust secure access platform that can operate as a remote access VPN, a ZTNA/BeyondCorp architecture, API/AI gateway, a PaaS, an infrastructure for MCP & A2A architectures or even as an ngrok-alternative and a homelab infrastructure.” Literally every single word of it

"...to make the world a better place." was missing from this paragraph.
Post reply on HN