Show HN: On-Demand Secure Private Networks – Documentation
wormhole.network
wormhole.network
They built their own technology, as opposed to us (we use SoftEther[1]) and it is very clever how they only use the servers as a sort of "meeting point" when possible.
I think however that both companies focus on different markets. We focus on small teams and MSP-like companies, because other targets don't seem ripe enough for our marketing power (i.e. money available to get into some markets).
I'm not fully sure about their focus though. At some point I thought they were after the enterprise, now I'm not so sure.
There are so many applications for our products that it's difficult to choose one, too (Docker multi-host networking, per-application networks, ...)
Interesting choice of IP range. It's reserved for carrier NAT. While I can see benefits to the choice, it could also make the service unusable for some of the customers that would most benefit from your service.
Thanks for your comment!
We really meant /24 :-) because this is not shared among networks. As we are targeting small/medium shops we don't need to have a full /16 or /10 for each network they create.
By using the IP space reserved for carrier grade NAT we're aiming to avoid any overlapping with RFC1918 networks in as many cases as possible. We've found that most of our prospective customers are in RFC1918 space, which was expected.
On the other hand, providing an option to configure your own DHCP settings is on the roadmap - in the meanwhile we're happy to accommodate any needs by manually changing the settings under request or even completely disabling DHCP. The network is layer 2, so you can do whatever you want with your layer 3 settings :-)
Hope our choice makes a bit more sense now, but we would definitely want to hear more detail about your concerns with the chosen IP space.
Thanks!
Also, the guides to install could use some work. Took me some poking around to figure it out for OS X. A HomeBrew script to install it would be cool.
The OS X guide is unfortunately not done yet, but the HomeBrew suggestion sounds like a really good idea. We will also work on improving guidance on our security model.
Thank you!!
We've shared our project before and got really useful feedback from the community (and a few users!). We've been now working on some of the most common feedback points:
- Documentation: This is what I'm linking now from here. Much better documentation than before, but still work in progress!
- Pricing: Now the pricing is shown on the project's landing page[1] due to popular demand.
I will appreciate any feedback you could give us! :-)
It's not better, it serves a different purpose.
With PIA and other VPN providers, you're after privacy for browsing, streaming, etc while our service creates a self-contained network with no "exit to Internet", at least provided by us.
The idea is to add to this network all the devices you would like to communicate with each other, for example:
- Your laptop and your cloud servers, so you don't have to open SSH to the whole world or use a different management VPN for every provider.
- Different cloud servers from different providers, so they can communicate securely with each other (e.g. frontend -> DB, orchestrator -> workers, etc)
- A Minecraft server and all your friend's computers, so you can play Minecraft in a private server hosted anywhere in the world.
- Play [INSERT OLD GAME WITH LAN MULTIPLAYER CAPABILITIES HERE] with your friends by adding all of them to the network and starting a LAN game.
This is more similar to products like Hamachi.
I'll work now on clarifying this on the FAQ and probably avoid mentioning VPN all along :)
https://wormhole.network/docs/faq.html
I'm replying here so you have visibility too :)