Defined Networking Blog

Another great use of a personal VPN - I work at https://www.defined.net (which uses Nebula as the underlying VPN technology) and also personally use our free tier (up to 100 hosts) for everything. Having my Ollama instances available only over my VPN overlay network is very slick.

Hey me too and I fully agree! Nebula is super underrated in this market space. I use Nebula to connect my primary datacenter rack with a bunch of dedicated servers and VMs all together on an overlay network. This makes it easy for me to add Nomad client nodes quickly in different parts of the world and everything just works. I actually use https://defined.net for a managed Nebula experience and it makes everything super easy to get going and the team is super helpful with the few issues that I have run into. The free tier is super generous with up to 100 hosts for free and you don't need a credit card to get started. I highly recommend checking it out.

Shameless plug, but some of the Nebula team (including myself) works on https://www.defined.net/ (proprietary managed Nebula networks.) Also, ZeroTier is "open-source ish." They use the BSL license for most of their code (https://www.zerotier.com/blog/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-transition/) and I believe you can self-host (https://docs.zerotier.com/selfhost/)

> Shameless plug, but some of the Nebula team (including myself) works on https://www.defined.net/ (proprietary managed Nebula networks.) My one objection to Nebula is that its Android app is proprietary, and your response is to plug the even more proprietary way to run it? > Also, ZeroTier is "open-source ish." So it's not FOSS.

Thanks for the recommendation! I wanted a VPN like this for a long time, to manage HA in a remote propery, and this seems like a great option. Even the hosted service is very reasonably priced - https://www.defined.net/pricing/

I've been looking at https://www.defined.net/ as an alternative. And also saw this on HN a month or so ago https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/tailscale-oidc-authelia-carpal

Maybe try Nebula? https://github.com/slackhq/nebula Or Defined Networks: https://www.defined.net/

I think Defined Networking[1] is also in this category, but I haven't seen too many comparisons. I have heard very good things. [1]: https://www.defined.net/

The team that built nebula at Slack actually split off and are building a similar type of network, that they give you a single pane of glass to manage, so you don’t have to manage a bunch of separate lighthouse devices manually. I evaluated it when going through the many available options out there a year or two ago, and it was still pretty green feature wise. Still very cool and could work very well depending on your use cases. See: https://www.defined.net/

Nebula seems to be under Defined Networking (https://www.defined.net/) now. It lacks the ease and tooling of the multitude of others that emerged in the space. My gut is that it's usable for the clever home user but meant for a professional IT dept with the ability/desire to build their own tooling and automation around it. The spartan mobile app is a sign of such. Tailscale is probably more easily usable for the average user than nebula or even vanilla wireguard.

There's https://zerotier.com, https://netbird.io, https://defined.net, https://github.com/tonarino/innernet and likely many more.

Nebula creators also started their own organization called Defined Networking to focus more on this networking: https://www.defined.net/

Nebula (a distributed mesh overlay network first developed at Slack) released their own network benchmarks today: https://www.defined.net/blog/nebula-is-not-the-fastest-mesh-vpn/ This is in response to this oft-cited benchmark post by Netmaker: https://medium.com/netmaker/battle-of-the-vpns-which-one-is-fastest-sp… Previous discussions on encrypted overly mesh networks here: "Would we still create Nebula today?" (Oct 2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37871534

Haven't used, but I believe lighthouses are primarily for host discovery (dns) + hole punching. I think if you configure static hosts on all nodes you're good: https://www.defined.net/nebula/config/#static_host_map