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Comment by grumblez | Hacker News Reader

Your physical network settings likely didn't allow direct connections between peers. Fix that and it'll work fine.

If it’s replacing an ipsec mesh that’s pretty hard to believe. And if that was the issue and commercial support couldn’t even identify that as the cause, ZeroTier has bigger issues.

If all sites are behind symmetric NATs, there's not much ZeroTier could do to help aside from telling him to assign direct mappings on the NAT/Firewall to each ZT instance. Symmetric NATs are antithetical to peer to peer communication. Many I've run across in the wild have special rules to handle IPSec which won't exist for other lesser known protocols. It's also possible the user wasn't willing or able to make network configuration changes to make those p2p connections possible. Without seeing what the user tried & support recommended, it's not really fair to throw out such baseless accusations.

ZeroTier uses UDP. That's hardly "lesser known" than IPSec.

"lesser known" as in protocols such as IPSec, ZeroTier, WireGuard, etc. Of which IPSec has been around forever and many NATs/Firewalls have special handling rules built in, just as @api mentioned in another comment. Yes, ZeroTier uses UDP underneath, but that doesn't mean symmetric NATs don't/won't cause havoc to peer to peer protocols using UDP.

Wrong layers of the network. IPSec is comparable to TCP/UDP, not wireguard/zerotier. It’s L4 and NAT can’t have enough intelligence to setup IPSec meshes without explicit configuration.

Finally, how can ZeroTier’s support be so incompetent to not recognize connectivity issues between endpoints? That’s one of the few things that goes wrong with tunnel meshes.

It was probably behind finicky and heavily restrictive symmetric NAT (very p2p-hostile) but with IPSec ALG in the NAT, making it work fine with IPSec but horribly with anything else. This is common in "enterprise" settings and hard to diagnose without direct remote access to run NAT characterization tests.

Symmetric NAT basically breaks everything that doesn't use a simple client/server hub-and-spoke networking model.

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