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?

  • milicent_bystandrOPEnglish
    1·
    10 days ago

    Is Headscale easier than Nebula? I thought it looked like it might become much more work.

    Nebula was mostly easy, but had a few hurdles I needed to learn.

    • Setting up systemd. I think I had to look that up and write a startup thing for it. I might have copied one from Syncthing or something! I don’t remember right now.
    • firewalls confused me a couple of times
    • and I had to get the hang of the certificate system of course

    I have mixed feelings about trying Defined Networking’s managed config, but I imagine that would get round the learning curve of the config.