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0 points1vuio0pswjnm75y ago0 comments

Looks like innernet relies on third party "Nebula" from "Slack Technologies" (commercialised IRC) which uses 70.199.182.92.

Perhaps the definition of "self-hosted" varies from person to person. The definition I subscribe to for "self-hosted" peer-to-peer is that I have to supply the publicly reachable IP address and run a supernode on it. (I prefer supernodes that only provide IP:port information for peers to directly connect and do not pass any traffic once the peers are connected.) Many of the so-called "peer-to-peer" projects I see today provide the IP address of a server run by a third party as part of their default configuration, with the option that a user could run their own server on their own IP address. (How many users do that.) Under the definition I subscribe to, nothing is for "free". I have to pay for the publicly reachable IP address and run the supernode from that address. Under another person's definition of "self-hosted", a third party might be hosting a necessary server. If they stop providing that service, the "self-hosted" solution no longer works.

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jauer5y ago· 3 in thread

Your understanding of how Nebula works is incorrect.

If you checked Nebula's readme you'd see the following:

> Nebula lighthouses allow nodes to find each other, anywhere in the world. A lighthouse is the only node in a Nebula network whose IP should not change. Running a lighthouse requires very few compute resources, and you can easily use the least expensive option from a cloud hosting provider. If you're not sure which provider to use, a number of us have used $5/mo DigitalOcean droplets as lighthouses.

Beyond that, innernet does not run on nebula.

1vuio0pswjnm7OP5y ago

Alright, I looked throught the code. Suprisingly there is no default configuration that includes a third-party-operated resource.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/slackhq/nebula/master/exam...

This puts Nebula in a relatively small group of what I would call true self-hosted overlay networks (by the definition of "self-hosted" I subscribe to). Kudos for that.

What drew my attention was the remote IP address in

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/slackhq/nebula/master/remo...

No idea why that is there.

Anyway, while I would not necessarily choose to run Nebula myself (I prefer smaller overlay networks, for example), it is certainly an exception to the pattern I see in so many other "self-hosted" peer-to-peer projects. I apologise if the comment I submitted implied otherwise.

Note I never suggested innernet "runs on Nebula". The words I used were "innernet relies on Nebula." Of course, that, too, is incorrect. The blog post was just comparing innernet to Nebula. My bad! I am just too cynical about peer-to-peer projects since so many fall into the same patterns I dislike; hence I skimmed where I should have read more closely.

psanford5y ago

> No idea why that is there.

That's a test file.

3np5y ago

Similar critique would, however, be somewhat accurate for Tailscale.

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