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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

What other VPNs do mesh networking? I only know of zerotier (proprietary) and nebula (FOSS except that the Android app is proprietary)

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Probably the closest to tailscale, optionally selfhosted, and using wireguard meshing would be https://netbird.io/

Shameless plug, but some of the Nebula team (including myself) works on https://www.defined.net/ (proprietary managed Nebula networks.)

Also, ZeroTier is "open-source ish." They use the BSL license for most of their code (https://www.zerotier.com/blog/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-transition/) and I believe you can self-host (https://docs.zerotier.com/selfhost/)

> Shameless plug, but some of the Nebula team (including myself) works on https://www.defined.net/ (proprietary managed Nebula networks.)

My one objection to Nebula is that its Android app is proprietary, and your response is to plug the even more proprietary way to run it?

> Also, ZeroTier is "open-source ish."

So it's not FOSS.

Sorry, I wasn't aware you had objections to proprietary products! After all, this was a thread about Tailscale and alternatives. :) Many people find it painful to setup a VPN network and prefer a managed solution (e.g. Tailscale instead of Wireguard.) Likewise, people have different understandings of what exactly FOSS means and I'm not deeply familiar with the BSL, so I'm not sure whether it would meet your needs.

Best of luck in your search! Maybe take a look at Tinc or Yggdrasil.

> Likewise, people have different understandings of what exactly FOSS means and I'm not deeply familiar with the BSL, so I'm not sure whether it would meet your needs.

https://mariadb.com/bsl11/

> The Business Source License (this document, or the “License”) is not an Open Source license.

I'm gonna take them at their word.

> Best of luck in your search! Maybe take a look at Tinc or Yggdrasil.

I did, but thanks:)

I've tried Nebula before, admittedly a while ago, and it seemed interesting, but much less user friendly than Tailscale. But one of these days I would like to play around with defined.net just to see what other options are out there.

I also tried ZeroTier and was extremely unimpressed, although again that was a few years ago. The performance on single threaded systems was absolutely terrible, which suggests some deeply broken code and made it unusable with a cheap VPS. The paceof development was also pretty slow and the insistence on homebrew crypto was also not confidence inspiring compared to something that used a proven solution like Wireguard.

ZeroTier works where Tailscale (Wireguard) is blocked eg Egypt.

Check out OpenZiti. Its open source, and does zero trust principles better. I wrote a blog comparing it and Tailscale - https://netfoundry.io/vpns/tailscale-and-wireguard-versus-ne...

There's zerotier, nebula like others have managed and also a few more older and fringey ones like tinc and hamachi that basically invented the same concept 10+ years before the rest.

Tinc[1]

[1]: https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc

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