mu VS Nebula

Depending on how minimal a distribution you want, a few years ago I had a way to take a single ELF binary created by my computing stack built up from machine code (https://github.com/akkartik/mu) and package it up with just a linux kernel and syslinux (whatever _that_ is) to create a bootable disk image I could then ship to a cloud server (https://akkartik.name/post/iso-on-linode, though I don't use Linode anymore these days) and run on a VPS to create a truly minimal webserver. If this seems at all relevant I'd be happy to answer questions or help out.

This was the thinking behind my https://github.com/akkartik/mu

Yes thank you, I was indeed alluding to https://github.com/akkartik/mu. Perhaps a more precise term would be "software stack".

I built a computer with its own languages, and I consider it to be _less_ cognitive load when everything is in 1/2/3 languages. I don't have to worry that the next program I want to read the sources will require "Go, Rust, C++, JS/TS, Python, Java, etc."

There are other metrics to consider besides your notions of cognitive load and productivity. Inferno predates most of the languages on your list. My computer (https://github.com/akkartik/mu) uses custom languages because I was able to design them to minimize total LoC, and to ensure the dependency graph has no cycles (unlike all of the conventional software stack, at least until https://www.gnu.org/software/mes connects up all the dots).

"Separation of concerns is a hard-won insight."

Absolutely. I'm arguing for separating just concerns, without entangling them with considerations of people.

It's certainly reasonable to consider my projects toy. I consider them research:

* https://github.com/akkartik/mu

* https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

"The idea that projects should take source copies instead of library dependencies is just kind of nuts..."

The idea that projects should take copies seems about symmetric to me with taking pointers. Call by value vs call by reference. We just haven't had 50 years of tooling to support copies. Where would we be by now if we had devoted equal resources to both branches?

"...at least for large libraries."

How are these large libraries going for ya? Log4j wasn't exactly a shining example of the human race at its best. We're trying to run before we can walk.

I still believe :) I'm looking not for an economic argument but for a strategic one. I think[1] a self-hosted setup with minimal dependencies can be more resilient than a conventional one, whether with a vendor or self-hosted.

https://sandstorm.io got a lot right. I wish they'd paid more attention to upgrade burdens.

[1] https://github.com/akkartik/mu

I'm very interested in the network stack, having explored it for a while for https://github.com/akkartik/mu before giving up. What sort of network card do you support?

Nebula - Peer-to-peer overlay network. Developed and used internally by Slack. Similar to Tailscale but completely open source. Doesn't use WireGuard. Written in Go.

(I am a Nebula maintainer.) We recently merged support for gVisor-based services, although it's very new, and I don't know of much experimentation that's been done with it yet: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/pull/965

Nebula, originally from Slack[0].

Wireguard rightly gets a lot of attention, but Nebula is a really simple and easy to deploy mesh network that is often overlooked.

It does lack a management GUI and that stuff is very much DIY.

[0] https://github.com/slackhq/nebula

Fair enough about the android mobile client... My use case only involves meshing linux appliances across various networks so we only need the nebula core binaries which are under MIT license

https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/blob/master/LICENSE

That's not at all confusing with Slack's Nebula. https://github.com/slackhq/nebula

Sounds like a bunch of your pain points are just related to needing an online CA or ICA. But, looking through the Nebula docs I don't know that it supports things like CRL addresses where you could host the CRL, or OCSP responders. Someone got support for an OCSP responder but never submitted a PR with completed code: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/issues/72

Nebula is a scalable, cross-platform overlay networking tool focused on performance, simplicity, and security. This portable tool is equally adapted for linking a small number of computers or scaling to connect tens of thousands. It integrates encryption, security groups, certificates, and tunneling into a powerful, cohesive connectivity solution. Thanks for the recommendation go to jmeador42.

Replying to my own comment as I can no longer edit it:

The folks over at Slack had an interesting discussion regarding the the "battle of the VPNs" article published by Netmaker I sourced in my parent comment:

https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/discussions/911

Interesting. I thought recognized the logo, apparently seems to be a commercial support offering of https://github.com/slackhq/nebula and they support the "nebula" iOS app. I had been using for nebula/defined in the past.

Nebula: Is super easy to get running. It uses an interesting angle, working on the service and not just the device level. Unfortunately their NAT support seems to be still quite problematic and I am not going to maintain all those forwarded ports manually. There is a PR to support PCP but even if that ever gets applied I am not sure how well that will play with older routers. While it should be battle proven at slack, the community seems to be not that active. It still has the in-house tool that just got released.