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

Iroh 1.0

iroh.computer

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 488 posts

Re: Iroh 1.0

#81

Post by kkapelon »

rklaehn wrote: post #62
Thaxll wrote: post #46

I don't understand the problem its trying to solve in the first place, IP works just fine, such as DNS. There is already IPv6 and quic, you need vendor and major software to have any traction in that field.

Iroh is QUIC. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just combining existing IETF RFCs in a creative way. Here is a concrete problem we solve. You have one device in your home WLAN behind a NAT. Your other device is in a 4g network, or behind another NAT at work. In most cases we can give you a direct connection between the two devices very quickly via hole punching, so you get the highest possible bandwidth a…

isn't this exactly what tailscale (and also zerotier, netmaker) do?

https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

Re: Iroh 1.0

#82

Post by rklaehn »

serf wrote: post #44
j4cobgarby wrote: post #2

Doesn't it seem odd to have "Pricing" for a protocol that's meant to serve a similar function to IP addresses? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

tailscale syndrome. "we want to be infrastructure for people, and a business towards professionals." stuck between "we need cash to operate" and "we want to be a public good infrastructural system." , with the negative parts of a for-profit whisked away with "Well it's open source." it's a business concept i'm okayish with as long as the "Well it's open source." caveat doesn't come with a total bespoke and unusable c…

Take a look yourself.

Our code is as good as we can make it, and everything is modular and well documented. For example our QUIC implementation noq which underlies every iroh connection can also be used as a standalone QUIC impl that implements QUIC multipath.

https://docs.rs/noq/latest/noq/

If we wanted to have "total bespoke and unusable code" we would have inlined all of this into the iroh repo to make it unusable.

Re: Iroh 1.0

#83

Post by gslepak »

handoflixue wrote: post #70
rklaehn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iroh is QUIC. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just combining existing IETF RFCs in a creative way. Here is a concrete problem we solve. You have one device in your home WLAN behind a NAT. Your other device is in a 4g network, or behind another NAT at work. In most cases we can give you a direct connection between the two devices very quickly via hole punching, so you get the highest possible bandwidth a…

Excuse my ignorance on the subject, but what does this solve that VPNs didn't already address?

VPNs do not allow you to connect two devices directly, they have to go through the VPN. They also do not allow you to connect devices that are not on the VPN. Iroh does P2P connections and punches holes through NATs when needed, so you can connect directly to devices on different networks that are behind firewalls.

Re: Iroh 1.0

#84

Post by kkapelon »

milkshakes wrote: post #73
handoflixue wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excuse my ignorance on the subject, but what does this solve that VPNs didn't already address?

vpns typically add at least one hop. this has the possibility of connecting directly via hole punching

Already possible with taiscale, netmaker, zerotier etc.

https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works

Re: Iroh 1.0

#85

Post by aliasxneo »

rklaehn wrote: post #62
Thaxll wrote: post #46

I don't understand the problem its trying to solve in the first place, IP works just fine, such as DNS. There is already IPv6 and quic, you need vendor and major software to have any traction in that field.

Iroh is QUIC. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel here, just combining existing IETF RFCs in a creative way. Here is a concrete problem we solve. You have one device in your home WLAN behind a NAT. Your other device is in a 4g network, or behind another NAT at work. In most cases we can give you a direct connection between the two devices very quickly via hole punching, so you get the highest possible bandwidth a…

Is that not what libp2p already offers? Not sure if it has QUIC out of the box, but hole-punching to UDP connectivity and then running QUIC over it isn't that hard.

Re: Iroh 1.0

#86

Post by noworriesnate »

dignifiedquire wrote: post #9
j4cobgarby wrote: post #2

Doesn't it seem odd to have "Pricing" for a protocol that's meant to serve a similar function to IP addresses? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

As others have already mentioned, iroh the core library and protocol is fully open source. But to finance the development of it, we offer additional services to make it easier to deploy and run it, especially for larger or more specialized use caes.

I don't mind paying for a subscription, as long as I'm not also paying for the privilege of being locked in to a specific vendor. If I pay for a subscription and then your prices quadruple or something, what are my options? Can I self-host a relay? Do I lose features if I do so?

Re: Iroh 1.0

#87

Post by rklaehn »

weavejester wrote: post #79
rklaehn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A difference between iroh and many p2p networks is that we try to use existing IETF standards (QUIC, TLS) as much as possible instead of reinventing the wheel. An iroh connection is just a QUIC connection, using TLS and TLS ALPNs for protocol negotiation. If you look at an iroh connection using wireshark, it is just a QUIC connection. You can use all the existing tools, and a lot of things you learn when using iroh t…

Forgive me if this is an ignorant question, but does your use of the Mainline DHT mean that Bittorrent clients will be responding to P2P address lookups from Iroh?

First of all: the p2p address lookup is an optional feature. You have to explicitly enable it.

Mainline is incredibly frugal in terms of resource use, but we want it disabled by default so mobile apps don't look like bittorrent clients and get flagged by the OS.

When we do a p2p address lookup, every mainline server node could possibly be responding. Any bep_0044 record gets stored on 20 random mainline server nodes.

So a bittorrent client that participates in the DHT as a server and is long running enough to be included into the DHT routing tables will respond, yes.

Re: Iroh 1.0

#88

Post by jhbruhn »

That to me looks like Reticulums [1] adressing ("Destinations") with transport done via QUIC. Does it add anything what Reticulum didn't already solve, other than using slightly different protocols - do they have an advantage?

[1] https://reticulum.network/

Re: Iroh 1.0

#89

Post by kkapelon »

dignifiedquire wrote: post #75
kamranjon wrote: post #50

To me this sounds like tailscale - does anyone have any insight into how what this is doing is similar or different?

Tailscale is built to be global to your device, while iroh is built to be embedded into each application. This allows application developers and users a much more fine grained and bespoke setup, than having a single global bridge.

you can embed tailscale on the application level https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tsnet

Re: Iroh 1.0

#90

Post by colinmarc »

serf wrote: post #44
j4cobgarby wrote: post #2

Doesn't it seem odd to have "Pricing" for a protocol that's meant to serve a similar function to IP addresses? Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

tailscale syndrome. "we want to be infrastructure for people, and a business towards professionals." stuck between "we need cash to operate" and "we want to be a public good infrastructural system." , with the negative parts of a for-profit whisked away with "Well it's open source." it's a business concept i'm okayish with as long as the "Well it's open source." caveat doesn't come with a total bespoke and unusable c…

Not affiliated, but I am a very happy user of Tailscale and a very happy user of Iroh; we use the latter in production at work.

Tailscale is a great service that happens to be open source, but Iroh is clearly structured as a library that you can build into whatever you want.

Post reply on HN