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Comment by Ingon | Hacker News Reader

I've been working for a while on https://github.com/connet-dev/connet. It gives a different twist at the same problem - instead of an overlay network at L4 (wireguard, etc) or publicly accessible endpoint at L7 (like ngrok) it "projects" a remote endpoint locally (e.g. as if you are running the service on your computer). Of course "locally" can always be a VPS that has caddy in front to give you ngrok-like experience.

The reason connet exists is that nothing (at the time I started, including netbird, tailscale/headscale, frp, rathole, etc) gave the same easy to understand, FOSS, self-hosted, direct peer-to-peer way of remote access to your resources. I believe it does accomplish this and it is self-hosted. And while a cloud deployment at https://connet.dev exists, it is nothing more then repackaging the FOSS project with user/token management.

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This is meant just for computers, right? A quick check of the readme showed that devices must run this or that commands, which seems difficult to do on an smartphone. I guess the ngrok-like setup would be the way to go for that case, given the increasing prevalence of phones and tablets as the single form of computing for lots of people

I've been thinking a lot about this case specifically. And you are right, phones are largely not supported right now - I've been researching how to make that happen. One case I've found that works for me currently is running connet via Termux - and I've made the necessary changes to support that.

Native iOS/Android clients, if possible, will probably be the next things I'll work on. At minimum they should enable you to run a "source" (e.g. a consumer of an exposed service), but ideally it will be the whole deal.

A neat idea, but projecting all of these services onto localhost is a bit of a security nightmare. Have you considered looking at what something like Twingate does? Using the CGNAT IP space for the projection allows you to give every individual service its own IP address, which helps quite a bit in terms of allowing you to isolate the services from e.g. malicious web pages.

I'll take a look at what twingate does for sure, thanks for pointing that out.

A few things that worth mentioning for connet's current state - you can technically bind to any local IP, not just loopback (or listen to them all). You also have the option of directly running a TLS/HTTPS destination (for mutual TLS directly to the service) or source (e.g. for mutual authentication between your local listener and the outside world). Another option is to build your own client and define how you want to source traffic - maybe its part of your app and there are no sockets or anything - you just connect and start talking.

Me seeing "Request a Demo" button -> immediately leaving.

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