this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
31 points (89.7% liked)

Selfhosted

40329 readers
368 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] uzay@infosec.pub 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

What made you choose Nebula over Tailscale? I'm running it through a self-hosted Headscale server and it's working well so far. I haven't looked into Nebula too much.

[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

the core bits of nebula are all open source. With tailscale, there is headscale, but that is made by a tailscale employee and it feels ripe for a rug pull whenever tailscale feels like it. with nebula, the lighthouse and user clients are open, so there is far less chance of that.

[–] uzay@infosec.pub 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I see. That is a valid concern. Though it feels unfair to say that headscale is 'made by a tailscale employee'. From what I understand, one of the main contributors of headscale was hired by tailscale, though he is not the only maintainer and does not own the repo from what I can tell. Still, Tailscale could decide to cede all support of headscale and that would likely hurt the project a lot. In the same way however nebula could decide to switch to proprietary licenses and discontinue their open source offerings.

[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 2 points 2 months ago

In the same way however nebula could decide to switch to proprietary licenses and discontinue their open source offerings.

Sure but you'd still have whatever the last commit was to nebula under the MIT license. It can be forked etc etc.

I am sure headscale is great, but its a side project and if so inclined (not saying they are, tailscale seem quite generous), they could kill it a lot faster than Defined Networking could kill nebula. But its all a gamble.

load more comments (1 replies)