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Comment by erikh | Hacker News Reader

ZeroTier isn't controlled by anyone other than ZeroTier.

Give it a shot! :)

I have not tried ZeroTier yet but have come across it quite a bit lately. What advantages if any would you say it has compared to just running a simple Wireguard VPN into your remote network?

ZeroTier is peer-to-peer, like Tailscale, and both of them maintain proxies, in case direct connection cannot be established.

The main difference (to Tailscale) is that ZeroTier doesn't need an identity provider, since each machine needs to be whitelisted in ZT admin panel.

It very much needs an identity provider, only they implement it themselves instead of outsourcing it to Google/MS.

On Tailscale you also need to whitelist machines in the web console. There's probably an automated way to do it as well but I haven't looked into it since I only use it for a few static hosts.

I've migrated from ZT to TS about a year ago because ZT was much slower (network bandwidth-wise) and CPU-intensive than Tailscale on my setup. YMMV.

You can self-host the ZeroTier controller which is the identity provider and you an do so without breaking interoperability with the rest of the network.

I migrated off ZT because of weird instability of traffic with file ops on Samba shares and the MagicDNS.

MagicDNS is such a killer feature, all nodes are really hands off and I don't need to worry about IP addresses anymore

"Is there a way to totally bypass ZeroTier's servers?" - https://github.com/zerotier/ZeroTierOne/issues/610

Bug was "[closed] since it's already on the road map" (???) for 1.4, but after 1.4 release it is still unclear if it is even possible.

Yeah. What tailscale is doing here seems like a great way to make networking even more fragile than it already is. I've checked out tailscale on occasion but always return to zerotier. I personally run my own zerotier infra. And standing up roots is relatively easy after you get through it once.

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