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Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust

rayfish.xyz

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Re: Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust

#81
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using a package manager usually

How did you install that package manager?

Until recently it was the one single time in my entire computers livespan I would paste the curl command into the terminal then everything else would be through package manager.

Now thanks to claude code etc it's been normalized that everyones doing it and normies who shouldn't be doing it are getting used to doing it.

Re: Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust

#82
post #67
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Nebula creates a layer-3 network[1]. Rayfish is built upon Iroh which is a layer-7 network. [1]: https://nebula.defined.net/docs/#technical-details

But ... Rayfish creates a layer 3 network too. It assigns IP addresses to each node. I don't really see why it matters from this point of view whether it uses Iroh or something else to provide its backhaul. That's like saying Wireguard works at layer 4 because it uses UDP. The whole point of VPNs is to offer some kind of tunneling over higher level protocols.

I always imagined that the application layer had some kind of extra overhead that would be unacceptable for general purpose use.

Re: Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust

#83

It is wrong to describe these P2P products as server-less. In order to connect two peers over WAN it needs a form of coordination server. Since Rayfish appears to be a Claude coded wrapper over Iroh it should at-least give credit to use of Iroh's discovery and relay nodes.

Hello! dev here.

Yes, we did use claude, somewhat. We do give a lot of credit to iroh. Check the description of the repo.

As per the AI stuff, rayfish is a very old idea. I had a lot of sketches on how a p2p mesh VPN should look like. So it started off as "hey claude, can you do this?" and of course because I use it I have to do a lot of things manually myself.

But of course, without iroh this project would have not been possible!

Re: Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust

#84

It is wrong to describe these P2P products as server-less. In order to connect two peers over WAN it needs a form of coordination server. Since Rayfish appears to be a Claude coded wrapper over Iroh it should at-least give credit to use of Iroh's discovery and relay nodes.

>Since Rayfish appears to be a Claude coded wrapper over Iroh it should at-least give credit to use of Iroh's discovery and relay nodes. But that would take understanding network fundamentals, architecture, etc. Who needs any of that cruft any longer?

We do have understanding of networks. Claude doesn't come up with concepts by itself. It is not too good to do that yet. We run an HFT firm as a main enterprise, not an easy job. Requires a lot of network fundamentals understanding.

Re: Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust

#85

Having an install script that you paste into the terminal and all it does is download a binary and stick it in a folder is wild. If your users are savvy enough to be running random scripts they shouldn't need a script to do this and if they're not savvy enough to understand how to do that then the last thing they should be doing on earth is running a random terminal command off a website.

you can also do `cargo install rayfish`. But not everybody has cargo, etc etc etc

Re: Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust

#86
post #36

Interesting project but can't find anything useful about the author's background on GitHub. Commit history shows the project is a couple weeks old and the commit velocity only seems possible with heavy LLM involvement. Not unexpected but worth noting. The repo's CLAUDE.md is huge which conflicts with published best practices around agent instructions and makes me wonder how much experience the author has using LLMs.…

Hello. Yeah this is my secondary account. Main one is dgrr. I still dont do much there. I have projects in github.com/infinitefield and now rayfish. Indeed yes I do not use LLMs too much. Rayfish was a project we had pending for years and I had a lot of sketches about it in my obsidian folders. After the release of iroh v1 I decided to try out claude and prompt it to solve the problem. Still, there is a lot of boilerplate and over time it will become much more like a handmade project assisted by LLMs than anything.

That said, it is not my main focus, although I use the product of course. Contributions are always welcome.

Re: Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust

#87

tinc ( https://tinc-vpn.org/ ), a OSS mesh vpn that has existed for a long, long time, is another great solution with no central server. You can manage the public key distribution yourself, or just keep them checked into a git repo (my preferred solution), and it's been solid for years .

Yes. There are good solutions out there. I just build rayfish because I want truly decentralized networks. My thought process is more like: what if you have your job's network and your gaming network? if you use tailscale you need to log off of one, log into the other. Still, you have centralized coordination servers and so on. With rayfish we also discard the ACL architecture and use network separation + per-device firewalls. So it is also trustless. In some way

Re: Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust

#88

I don't know why your post was autoflagged but what makes your product unique from the rest?

My product is unique because it is not a product. Like it is mentioned in the article. I don't care about monetization, I just want a good trustless p2p vpn that anybody can use. In the future even normies will be able to. I am working on an android/ios app (ios not yet but in the future) to at least share my clipboard with my computer or send images. Which seems trivial but you dont have a really good (not battery consuming) solution for androidmacos.

Anyway. Rayfish is p2p no central coordination needed. Other's do need some central coordinator. The main disadvantage one might find is that it uses iroh which is built on top of QUIC. Tailscale and others use wireguard, which is nice and compatible with legacy VPNs. Also they have a kernel driver which we dont. It's all userspace. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel.

Re: Rayfish, Peer-to-peer mesh VPN with no server to trust

#89

So it's effectively a clone of Nebula minus the need for a lighthouse.

I didn't really knew what Nebula was until I saw the comparison made by claude. I tried solutions like tailscale before but never nebula. If you like that product keep using it. The `it's nebula minus X feature` doesn't really fit here
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