Comment by ktta | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ktta | Hacker News Reader

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Every other VPN is different from ZeroTier. I would say a large additional job of ZeroTier is direct connection facilitation between two endpoints rather than route all traffic through a server.

If you have two computers behind NAT, the ZeroTier will help you punch through your NAT and let the computers talk to each other directly. It does it extremely well, and I haven't seen anything like it.

Cool thing is, it can do everything that a normal VPN can. When the other commenters talk about them hosting the 'server'. They're talking about configs, etc. Traffic doesn't usually go through their servers. Just in rare cases where your ISP is really hell bent of preventing you from UDP hole punching.

People always forget about ZeroTier's network flow rules. In a little text file/field, you have a full-on software-defined networking appliance, with filters on any kind of Layer 3-4 information, and a capability model. You could regulate a medium corporate network in about 50 lines, giving people capabilities as required or segmenting areas with tags. And it would work exactly the same whether laptops were inside the building or not. And you can do mad stuff like 'copy all TCP traffic with dport X to some machine running tcpdump'. The whole thing is a dream. I love it.

I personally use it as a replacement for AWS VPN Gateway using a ZT managed route and a couple of VPC route table entries. I detail that setup in my ZeroTier Terraform plugin: https://github.com/cormacrelf/terraform-provider-zerotier

I haven't looked at ZeroTier since they made those feature additions. I'll have to check them out.

EDIT: Just did. This[1] is amazing.

[1]: https://www.zerotier.com/manual.shtml#3_4

How we moved to Google Cloud using Consul and ZeroTier with zero downtime | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15548642 (Oct 2017)

This. Performance is superb, and the connections are direct. Stable, super simple.

Highly underrated and too much under the radar afaik

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