I’ve been playing around with self hosting for file sharing, backups, and a handful of other ideas I might one day get round to. I like the idea of a mesh VPN and being able to, for example, connect a travelling laptop to a ‘host’ laptop nearby, though my only public ip is a VPS in another country.

Of all the options I found, I liked the look of Nebula most. Fiddly in some places, but it’s working nicely for me, and I appreciate some of the simplicity of design.

I’m wondering if people here have much experience of it, though? My biggest concern is over its future. With,

  1. The Defined Networking site focusing on making money off it, and
  2. The Android app doesn’t allow full configuration (including the firewall, so I can’t host a website from a phone) but - I heard - does if you use Defined Networking’s paid service for configuration,

makes me worry they might be essentially trying to deprecate viable FOSS Nebula in favour of a paid or controlled service.

Any thoughts? Insight?

  • @node815English
    4•3 months ago

    I have been using Tailscale, connected it to my domain, I use Authentik for my OIDC/SSO Sign in and tied it that way for the MFA OIDC Login Tailscale let’s you use. All I needed to do is setup a webfinger for it and once it verified my domain, I was able to give them my OIDC settings for them. Tailscale so far for me in the last year or so has been quite simple to use. Plus, being able to log into my admin console and any devices I enroll through Authentik’s front end, has given me peace of mind knowing it’s quite secure. (All of this on a Proxmox server BTW).

    One may argue about self hosting Wireguard and I agree, it’s quite easy to do if you use something like wg-easy which makes it simple to add phones to your network. My concern with it though was having to poke a hole into my firewall for the WG traffic to hit the server, once I got into Tailscale, it’s made it easier and I don’t have any open ports on the router now. I think this is primarily why the Jupiter Broadcasting guys push it so much on their podcasts, not to mention one of the hosts on his podcast is an employee for Tailscale as well, so that probably helps a bit.

    As for funding for both Nebula, or Tailscale, they do cater to enterprise customers so you have the assurance that they do have to answer to them if they revoke a service or ruin it. :)

    For Tailscale, it’s just a matter of them allowing you to add 100 devices for free and it’s simple command to install it on any client via the cli including Apple TV for example. For phones, I have Tailscale on my phone connected 24/7 to my exit node which is my Proxmox server which acts as one, and as a backup, my Raspberry Pi which acts as one as well. So, even if I’m on the road or away from home, I’m always on my home network (unless blocked by overzealous sysadmins on their public WiFi networks). There’s not much to manage via the phone, but I like to think it’s ‘set and forget’ really, once you have it all configured, it just runs in the background and they do not decrypt your traffic much less care what goes through it.