ZeroTier Blog

> "THE PRO TERMINAL FOR iOS & iPadOS", from the front page.

Then what's Mosh? Why bring it up?

> " You bought the latest Pro device, loved it, and then you wondered...
> …Can I use it to replace my laptop?

No, I didn't but I know it's supposed to be appealing. The original comment about it was more appealing than that line. Still.

> Yes, you can

Can I? Because I can "code all day from the beach"? (which doesn't sound fun, actually)

It's facetious, it's anodyne while striving to be zippy, and worst of all, it's meaningless. I've seen half-arsed Github READMEs that are more informative. Do I really have to pull out alternatives to show the difference? Okay then.

There is ZeroTier[1], which I'm going to guess is a Mosh equivalent as I have zero (ha) desire to find out any more about Mosh. This is their initial blurb:

> Connect team members from anywhere in the world on any device.
> ZeroTier creates secure networks between on-premise, cloud, desktop, and mobile devices.

Now that answers my questions and the rest of the page goes into more detail.

Now for a shell - let's take Fish[2] because I've heard about it but never bothered with it. This will be fun…

> fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell for Linux, macOS, and the rest of the family.

It then goes into features which is an indirect answer to the why so I'll give them half marks there.

Oops, my mistake, it's a terminal we need. Since I use iTerm[3] nowadays:

> What is iTerm2?

> iTerm2 is a…

What I like to use is:

- Blink shell
- hooked to a tmux session
- connected with Mosh
- over a ZeroTier network
- to a UNIX machine in the cloud or at home (Linux, macOS, whatever).

The effect is a really snappy and powerful shell in a full UNIX system that stays up and connected even though your connection is dropped or moves from wifi to cellular, and your networks still stay closed and secure.

It's not the same as running Linux on the phone. However, in some respects it's better. It's trivially easy to move the session to another device (phone/tablet, or computer), and you don't need to use the phone's battery for processing. And you can summon a ton of computing power if you need to.

Blink shell, an iOS terminal emulator: https://www.blink.sh

tmux is like screen. It's a bit arcane at first but it's worth it. (Mouse scrollback is recommended. It works inside blink.) Introduction: https://hackernoon.com/a-gentle-introduction-to-tmux-8d784c404340

mosh enhances ssh and adds roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and cuts perceived lag a lot by being smarter about the interface vs. the network roundtrip. (It works kind of like a online game engine that predicts network events). https://mosh.org

ZeroTier is an open-source secure virtual network layer that's good at hole punching so you can just have the real network completely walled off: https://www.zerotier.com/

ZeroTier | https://www.zerotier.com | Full-Time | Remote

Securely connect any device, anywhere.

ZeroTier lets you build modern, secure multi-point virtualized networks of almost any type. From robust peer-to-peer networking to multi-cloud mesh infrastructure, we enable global connectivity with the simplicity of a local network. We have millions of active users with hundreds of millions of devices connected to their own private mesh networks.

We're looking for data/analytics and UI engineers who want to work at the intersection of networking, security, and usability, helping an amazing community of open source and commercial users. You'll be joining a fully-distributed team of ~12 (total; six in eng) with backgrounds in Linux networking, cloud ops, cryptography, and cross-platform product development and delivery.

Data eng: https://jobs.lever.co/zerotier/aeaeb543-1217-4897-aeb3-68e6db36d107

UI/UX: https://jobs.lever.co/zerotier/71024431-2935-48aa-9e5c-4fa467336e6b

I'm the head of engineering + hiring manager so if you have questions about the company, product, or roles, feel free to reach out directly: lennon.day.reynolds@zerotier.com

(We unfortunately can't sponsor visas or hire internationally at this point, so these are US-only positions.)

I haven't been offended by it, and I'm the founder of a company that's been around longer and is probably the closest competitor: https://www.zerotier.com/

I don't hate on people for doing similar things. If anything I am absolutely shocked it took someone this long, since to me the idea of a full mesh virtual network is how things should work, everything else is stupid and clunky, the fact that we have to bounce off servers to transfer things is dumb, and NAT is pure concentrated evil and must be destroyed.

I absolutely loved David Crawshaw's Remembering the LAN post:

https://crawshaw.io/blog/remembering-the-lan

It echoes exactly the sentiments that motivated me to start working on ZeroTier, so I wish them well.

As far as the upvotes go I just figured they have a lot of friends from their time at Google and their posts get upvoted a lot.

I notice the same thing when any company that has a lot of HN users among its employee base does anything. When AWS, Apple, and Google do a bunch of product releases the front page gets bombed for days. The site practically turns into a news feed of new AWS Elastic Beanie Cap products when the ironically titled AWS ReInvent happens. If anything the FAANG companies get more free advertising here than anyone.

Philosophizing on your blog seems to be the new way to tilt at windmills. If you're actually interested in self-hosting, https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted is a great resource for self-hosted apps. Roll up your sleeves, get prepared to get lost in documentation, and have some fun! You'll realize the tradeoffs of what to self-host and what not-to quickly as you start playing around with actual technologies. Just remember that your life is production and if you're self-hosting XMPP for your family, you may want to be confident you know how to run XMPP before pushing everyone onto it, so maybe setup a lab or staging environment. But that's fine, it's part of the process! Stop writing screeds and start actually self-hosting.

EDIT: Since I'm mostly just reposting the link that OP links in their post, I'll add a couple fun things that I use a lot with self-hosting.

https://hoppy.network/ lets you setup a Wireguard tunnel to have your own static IPv4 /32 and /128 IPv6.

https://freerangecloud.com/ gives you similar products but also lets you do things like colocating a Raspberry Pi or getting a VPS at an IX

https://www.zerotier.com/ can effortlessly setup a private network between hosts

There's more I'm sure, but I like these.

https://zerotier.com does a very nice job of NAT "bouncing", free (hosted) for up to 50 hosts, or you can run your own.

You end up with another "zt" interface, so you can apply firewall rules to that interface, separate from your main NIC(s), kinda like assigning your own VPC but for your laptop, etc. It only takes a few seconds to install the agent and join your private network, and it seems to reconnect quite nicely as well; if your network is private, you can force all new attempts to connect to be approved (where you can check the mac address first). Basically, it's exactly the right level of technical config traits with a simple interface.

(no affiliation, just a very happy user, but I will say that running your own seems to be a lot more difficult than it should be..)