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Comment by ben-schaaf | Hacker News Reader

Your phone and laptop don't have stable IPs, let alone DNS entries pointing to them.

but dynamic DNS is a thing. I've had setups for it since god knows how long, though admittedly not on my phone.

Dynamic DNS takes setup for every single device, and obviously doesn't work for devices that switch networks frequently. It also doesn't help you if the IP is behind a NAT.

DynDNS does not work for devices behind a NAT unless you manually set up port forwarding.

Iroh gives you the connectivity of DynDNS without any manual configuration.

They do if you use tailscale and friends

Everyone I'd like to connect to isn't on my tailscale, nor do I want them to be.

They don't need to be https://tailscale.com/docs/features/tailscale-funnel

For this simple scenario (just exposing your laptop to a public IP) there are already a gazillion alternatives (e.g. ngrok)

Funneling means opening up the device for the entire internet to access, not just to those with my public key like in iroh. It's limited to 3 ports. It requires setup for each device. It's not peer-to-peer. It has throttled bandwidth.

No, this does not do the same thing as iroh. Not even close.

The goal posts keep moving.

First iroh was marketed as "solves communication behind NAT". Then we went to application level NAT busting vs node level NAT busting. Then we went to distributed vs client-server, then we went to stable IPs for non-server devices (your original comment). Now we moved to "true peer to peer" and "public keys".

This just tells me that the marketing site doesn't explain what Iroh actually does.

The fact that so many other people (apart from me) asked about the connection to Tailscale is also interesting.

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