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

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

#121

Post by geoctl »

canada_dry wrote: post #120
therealpygon wrote: post #20

Just some feedback to share some problems I personally think you’re going to have and why I suspect you’ll face a healthy amount of skepticism. There is a lack of history of development that ends with a major initial commit of unknown origin, a lack of any public information, a company that does not appear (publicly) to exist, and a product that is going to solve every need that can be imagined by packing it with buz…

> solo dev/no name company is going to suddenly drop a product A developer/company with an opaque background that you're to trust to give access to backend systems using passwordless embedded SSH (no keys needed!). That's a big NOPE. (Also, even the answers OP has provided really give an AI bot vibe)

Octelium's author here. You don't give me access to anything. The project is 100% open source and designed specifically for self-hosting. I don't even know whether you're using the project or not since there isn't usage telemetry to begin with. As for the SSH part of your weird comment, I wonder whether you even understand what embedded passwordless SSH means in the first place.

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

#122

Post by ethan_smith »

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)?

Looking at the docs, Octelium uses a hub-and-spoke model with Gateways acting as central routing points, unlike Tailscale's direct peer-to-peer mesh - this architectural difference impacts performance, privacy, and deployment complexity.

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

#123

Post by geoctl »

ethan_smith wrote: post #122
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)?

Looking at the docs, Octelium uses a hub-and-spoke model with Gateways acting as central routing points, unlike Tailscale's direct peer-to-peer mesh - this architectural difference impacts performance, privacy, and deployment complexity.

No, Octelium does not use a hub-and-spoke model. It's a distributed system that's a horizontally salable architecture on top of Kubernetes. This design is meant to provide seamless horizontal scalability and availability, among other things.

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

#125

Post by et1337 »

geoctl wrote: post #9
mzhaase wrote: post #6

I have an immediate complete distrust to anything that throws around so many buzzwords. This is the github page and I still don't understand what it even does, specifically.

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

You’re getting a lot of negative feedback but I think it’s mostly just people who don’t speak (or actively hate) enterprise jargon. Hacker News is not super enterprisey. Just don’t respond. I work for a company called StrongDM and we basically do exactly what Octelium does. I was able to determine that pretty quickly from your website which is not common. Enterprise security is just inherently a buzzwordy, vague cloud of companies all competing to own the magic quadrant.

That said, you are also including some buzzwords on your homepage that appeal to Hacker News folks, like “self-hosted”. That will get a blank stare from enterprise folks.

So I think you should pick one audience or the other. Tailscale took the strategy of appealing to Hacker News types and then shifting up market from there. My company appeals directly to the biggest enterprises we can find and the difference is stark.

I think you’ll get less negative feedback if you choose one of these target audiences and focus on them exclusively.

edit: by the way, Octelium looks awesome, well done!

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

#126

Post by geoctl »

et1337 wrote: post #125
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.

You’re getting a lot of negative feedback but I think it’s mostly just people who don’t speak (or actively hate) enterprise jargon. Hacker News is not super enterprisey. Just don’t respond. I work for a company called StrongDM and we basically do exactly what Octelium does. I was able to determine that pretty quickly from your website which is not common. Enterprise security is just inherently a buzzwordy, vague clou…

Thank you really for your kind comment. I am not really against negative comments because they might actually lead to improvements. And btw I am personally a fan of what StrongDM has been doing lately especially when it comes with ABAC and Cedar. This is what I've been trying to achieve in Octelium with CEL and OPA.

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

#127

Post by braginini »

ttul wrote: post #49
ar-nelson wrote: post #16

For everyone who's having a hard time parsing what Octelium does, I found this page to be the clearest explanation: https://octelium.com/docs/octelium/latest/overview/how-octel... It's clearer because, instead of starting with a massive list of everything you could do with Octelium (which is indeed confusing), it starts by explaining the core primitives Octelium is built on, and builds up from there. And it actually…

TailScale is wonderful but they do need competition. I imagine an IPO is on the horizon, and as soon as they enter that phase, nasty price increases are sure to follow unless someone else is nipping hard at their heels.

There is https://netbird.io

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

#128

Post by illiac786 »

geoctl wrote: post #47
cyanydeez wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the primary concern was you look like a State actor using a AI to generate a project you hope private companies will use and your intentions don't appear clear, and the verbose replies & github suggest a lot of effort into a facade without anything else. One might posit that you're repackaging a fOSS project from somewhere with no clear ethos.

I have been developing the project solo on a private GitHub repo since 2020. I am not VC-backed or whatever else, Octelium has been a solo effort so far basically. The project itself is now 100% open source as you can see. However, even if I open sourced the initial private repo, what would make you believe that I am who I really am? maybe even all those git commits from 2020 weren't really from 2020 and their timest…

Don’t let these comments get to you.

If they don’t trust you, it’s their right, but then they should just not use the software, instead of writing this type of caustic comments. Poor form in my view.

Keep up, it looks amazing!!

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

#129

Post by geoctl »

illiac786 wrote: post #128
geoctl wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been developing the project solo on a private GitHub repo since 2020. I am not VC-backed or whatever else, Octelium has been a solo effort so far basically. The project itself is now 100% open source as you can see. However, even if I open sourced the initial private repo, what would make you believe that I am who I really am? maybe even all those git commits from 2020 weren't really from 2020 and their timest…

Don’t let these comments get to you. If they don’t trust you, it’s their right, but then they should just not use the software, instead of writing this type of caustic comments. Poor form in my view. Keep up, it looks amazing!!

If anything I am actually thankful to HN for the opportunity letting me show my work here. Negative comments are not really that big of an issue for me. I just wish they were generally clearer and more specific so that I can easily fix whatever needs to be fixed. Most of the complaints were simply related to the README while I was expecting and honestly hoping for critique for the architecture and internals of Octelium itself.

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

#130

Post by braginini »

FloatArtifact wrote: post #115
PoachedEggs wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been meaning to explore Netbird. Fewer features at the moment, but can be fully self hosted.

Their mobile android app is awful.

We have just published our android app rework for testing. Mind trying it out? Appreciate the feedback

https://www.reddit.com/r/netbird/s/lRjyehCQFi

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