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ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address

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Re: ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address

#61

Post by bastard_op »

I've been using Zerotier personally and professionally for some 10 years or more and as a network engineer I love the product, and have long recommended it. I've compared it to Tailscale, and while Tailscale has a lot more enterprise-y features, they too miss some key features of Zerotier like being able to use route ANY subnet IP addresses, not just limited to their 100.64/10 addressing Tailscale limits you to. Tailscale also requires you to use an oauth account for users, which has never been compelling for personal use.

I also believe it was around before Tailscale, or at least I knew of it before Tailscale, but I've never seen a compelling need to move from Zerotier to Tailscale.

Re: ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address

#62

Post by em-bee »

mkl wrote: post #16
jonplackett wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hug of death

Problematic design. It's a static page, and should be served as such; a Raspberry Pi could probably handle that, and it's easy to put behind Cloudflare or similar.

i am not the poster, but i am in a similar situation with my own blog.

just because my blog could be hosted on a static page, i am not going to go through the effort to set up a separate server just for that when i am already hosting a website with dynamic content and my goal is to host my blog with a minimum of effort on the same site. and i am especially not going to buy a raspberry pi just for that. and if i put it behind cloudflare i am just going to annoy the other half of hackernews readers asking why everything has to be behind cloudflare.

Re: ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address

#63

Post by mkl »

em-bee wrote: post #62
mkl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problematic design. It's a static page, and should be served as such; a Raspberry Pi could probably handle that, and it's easy to put behind Cloudflare or similar.

i am not the poster, but i am in a similar situation with my own blog. just because my blog could be hosted on a static page, i am not going to go through the effort to set up a separate server just for that when i am already hosting a website with dynamic content and my goal is to host my blog with a minimum of effort on the same site. and i am especially not going to buy a raspberry pi just for that. and if i put i…

I'm not suggesting a separate server or a Raspberry Pi (that was just an example of the low resource needs), just having non-dynamic pages to not be hitting the database, so be cached somewhere (hopefully automatically), or using a server configured to serve them statically.

Re: ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address

#64

Post by notpushkin »

bayesianbot wrote: post #23
notpushkin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> from my understanding, it generates always tailnet ip for hosts It does, but it should connect over LAN when both devices are on the same network. The tailnet IP doesn’t exist outside the WireGuard network, so it’s up to the WireGuard routing algorithm.

I thought it was Tailscale that always selects which IP to use as endpoint for other devices, and set that up for Wireguard? If I'm wrong, could I replicate that behavior (using relay on WAN, direct connection on LAN) with Wireguard without external configuration tools?

Hmm, yes, I think you’re right. Tailscale does handle the connection here, not Wireguard.

I’ve digged into it a bit and I believe it first connects over a relay, then the devices try to find a more optimal route. So for LAN, they would exchange their local IPs and try to connect over those. If they are indeed on the same LAN, they connect directly: https://tailscale.com/kb/1257/connection-types

This is not without issues, however: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/7206

Re: ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address

#65

Post by em-bee »

mkl wrote: post #63
em-bee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am not the poster, but i am in a similar situation with my own blog. just because my blog could be hosted on a static page, i am not going to go through the effort to set up a separate server just for that when i am already hosting a website with dynamic content and my goal is to host my blog with a minimum of effort on the same site. and i am especially not going to buy a raspberry pi just for that. and if i put i…

I'm not suggesting a separate server or a Raspberry Pi (that was just an example of the low resource needs), just having non-dynamic pages to not be hitting the database, so be cached somewhere (hopefully automatically), or using a server configured to serve them statically.

the platform i use stores everything in a database. it doesn't even support reading static files from disk. and why should that even matter. the filesystem is just a different kind of database. as for purely static pages, i happen to have a small website that is purely static too, served from the same platform. and already maintaining the navigation for a few pages is a pain. i could use a static site generator, but then i'd have to use different tools from the rest of the site. and that also increases the maintenance effort and adds dependency on yet another tool. my current plan is to keep the pages static but use js to create the navigation. that would add the cost of a REST API call to get the list of pages and affect the cacheability for the navigation part. if only html had an tag then maintaining the navigation would be a lot easier without js.

Re: ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address

#66

Post by Diti »

cassianoleal wrote: post #56
Diti wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any feedback regarding lag? I like the potential of Shelly products, but every single light I bought from them has a 2-second lag, as the devices seem to want to light up only AFTER being connected to the WiFi.

> want to light up only AFTER being connected to the WiFi Do you isolate them at the switch? If you do, then it's less likely "connected to WiFi" and more likely that's the time to boot up the firmware. If you don't, then they should always be up and connected to the wifi. I've used Shelly lights with no issues, even pressing the button on a Zigbee switch to send a signal to Home Assistant who would in turn tell the…

I actually described it incorrectly. I was indeed talking about the response time after using a light switch to turn on the lights the dumb, old-fashioned way.

So, yeah, you’re right, it must be the time it takes for the firmware to boot up. My question still stands, then – can this boot-up time be reduced or avoided?

Re: ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address

#67

Post by lostmsu »

bclemens wrote: post #21

Also consider Nebula: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula ZeroTier does not use an OSI approved open-source license. It is under a freedom-restricting "Business Source License". Nebula is MIT licensed. Nebula is much simpler and in most cases faster than ZeroTier.

I tried Nebula, but ended up with Yggdrasil instead. https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/

Unlike Nebula, it gives you an IPv6 address (actually, millions of them per node, if needed).

They now also have a userspace only SOCKS 5 proxy server that can connect your app to the whole network without forcing user to install drivers or to mess with their network configuration.

Re: ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address

#68

Post by cassianoleal »

Diti wrote: post #66
cassianoleal wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> want to light up only AFTER being connected to the WiFi Do you isolate them at the switch? If you do, then it's less likely "connected to WiFi" and more likely that's the time to boot up the firmware. If you don't, then they should always be up and connected to the wifi. I've used Shelly lights with no issues, even pressing the button on a Zigbee switch to send a signal to Home Assistant who would in turn tell the…

I actually described it incorrectly. I was indeed talking about the response time after using a light switch to turn on the lights the dumb, old-fashioned way. So, yeah, you’re right, it must be the time it takes for the firmware to boot up. My question still stands, then – can this boot-up time be reduced or avoided?

Probably not. The way these lights are supposed to be operated is indeed always on. If you want to keep the old-school switch, you can put a smart relay behind it.
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