Comment by antoniomika | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antoniomika | Hacker News Reader

There are many (always) free alternatives out there which you can find in a fairly comprehensive list at awesome-tunneling [0]. I'd caution anyone as there's always risk with downloading a no sources available binary as well, but this looks like it could be another good option!

My favorite two projects currently in the tunneling space are sish [1] and bore [2]. sish is more full featured and utilizes ssh for handling proxies (disclaimer: I wrote sish) while bore maintains a client/server but all sources are available for both. They're written in Go and Rust respectively. There's even a publicly accessible instance of bore running. You should submit a PR to include CRProxy in the awesome-tunneling list, I know Anders might do that as well as he's normally around these parts :)

[0] https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

[1] https://github.com/antoniomika/sish

[2] https://github.com/ekzhang/bore

Thank you for writing sish! We’ve been using sish as a self-hosted alternative to ngrok because of how easy and flexible it is to configure and because it allows us to tunnel to devices without installing any extra device-side software (since it uses ssh). I highly recommend it among all the other great projects on the awesome-tunneling list

Awesome, glad it’s useful! If there’s anything that could be better or weird issues, please do let me know!

Thank you for letting me know.

I understand the issue with a closed-source client. It wouldn't be trivial to open source at the moment, but maybe there's a path to do it in the future.

Sorry if it does not fit your business model, but in my opinion, it would be plainly stupid for anyone to download and run on his machine or server a closed source binary, especially when the goal is to give remote access through internet. And so that it is expected that this binary will open a direct pipe with the internet...

Literally any pre-compiled binary could do nefarious things... why make a big deal out of this one?

First, because if you are on a Linux distribution, you will tend to only take binaries from trusted sources like distribution repos that are imperfect but still audited and work on having reproducible builds.

Second because you can usually contained a closed source binary, let's say 'zoom' for example, but here the root goal is to open a pipe to the internet and give access to the console or local network, so it will be hard to check what it does and constrain it in normal operations.

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