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,
- The Defined Networking site focusing on making money off it, and
- 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?
Doesn’t selfhosting headscale prevent the keys to the kingdom thing you’re talking about?
Yes. But it removes some benefits. You again open some ports or use a VPS to host it. The benefit of not needing to have open ports on other servers and central auth and management still stands.
Nebula you also need a VPS or something public for the coordination server (‘lighthouse node’). Seems there’s no way around that at the moment: at least one machine, of your own or another’s, has to have a public IP so the other machines can learn how to connect to each other.