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Comment by fiatjaf | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible to use cjdns for that kind of thing? I'm genuinely asking as I don't understand it.

Once I tried to set up a VPN using some odd Windows software (OpenVPN, maybe?) and the results were disastrous. I didn't understand any of the jargon the program used, and I think I didn't get what was its main use case (most certainly it wasn't what I was trying to do, that was creating a local subnet between two computers or two LANs).

Then some months later I tried ZeroTier and was able to understand everything, it seemed a perfect fit.

But still, people call ZeroTier a VPN. So why is it so different? And why does it use a jargon so different?

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I think zeroTier is meant to be easy whereas openVPN is versatile and can be configured in many ways.

One use case of a VPN is to connect two local networks together. Another is to have your traffic appear to be coming from a different geographical area.

In some cases you wouldn't want the local networks to be able to speak, like commercial VPN services, for security reasons.

Shouldn't these two cases/features have different names? They're completely different. Calling both "VPN" is wrong.

I ran cjdns for 5 years but recently switched off it. For one, it seemed to have too much traffic over my limited outbound link when things should have been more idle. Also, the commit logs were a little unnerving to me for code I'm trusting with my network security:

All kinds of "oops" edits: https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/3abe50b8e744f72696... https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/feabb1970fbaecf65c... https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/c51d89431f1fa42955... https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/1b0c999bd2e5988c3f... https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/355d7d77cc82c52bf1... (function args passed in the wrong order)

Some are about extra traffic: https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/8bcfbf227a87020931... https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/commit/0ee9cb7f45b466232b...

Also it's ipv6 only, which took some fussing. Performance was fine, even on rpi. Reestablishing links was slow and sometimes required restarting of the daemon. Daemons would occasionally get wedged. Log output is unconventional and uses a special reader tool (a la adb for android). Occasionally routes wouldn't be chosen right (two home computers would route via an external cloud box), which I'd fix by restarting the right daemons.

I laboriously switched to openvpn (two networks) and haven't worked out all the routing and hotswitching for my roaming phone+laptop yet. Now I'm considering vita, tinc, zerotier, or wireguard. Probably I'll try out zerotier to see if it works out of the box, then try wireguard if I'm going to have to configure it a lot, since it seems like WG is the most unix-toolbox-do-one-thing out of all of them.

Check out Yggdrasil - https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ - we've tried very hard to solve the problems that cjdns has, seem to be much more reliable in real world conditions and we send/receive much less idle traffic to do it. We also have Wireguard-like crypto-key routing for both IPv4 and IPv6. (I am one of the developers.)

Wow, that's nice. I'm going to start using that now.

cjdns always seems so intimidating when I look at it, Yggdrasil looks super friendly and easy.

Thank you very much.

Actually, I don't know what are people trying to achieve when they run these things.

Did you had a problem cjdns was solving?

Yes, some machines on different networks in my house plus a roaming laptop all got to talk to each other without hassle. They got random-looking ipv6 addresses, so I don't know if 'subnet' is the right word here.

Before, I had to act differently on the laptop based on where I was, and the raspi nodes on my guest wifi couldn't reach the influxdb server that was not exposed to the wifi net.

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