Tinc Alternatives

tinc reviews and mentions

• Tailscale Is Pretty Useful
  19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Mar 2025
• The New Internet
  15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Jul 2024
• Would we still create Nebula today?
  14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Oct 2023

  But both Nebula and tinc max out at around 1 Gbit/s on my Hetzner servers, thus not using most of my 10 Gbit/s connectivity. This is because they cap out at 100% of 1 CPU. The Nebula issue about that was closed due to "inactivity" [2].

  I also observed that when Nebula operates at 100% CPU usage, you get lots of package loss. This causes software that expects reasonable timings on ~0.2ms links to fail (e.g. consensus software like Consul, or Ceph). This in turn led to flakiness / intermittent outages.

  I had to resolve to move the big data pushing softwares like Ceph outside of the VPN to get 10 Gbit/s speed for those, and to avoid downtimes due to the packet loss.

  Such software like Ceph has its own encryption, but I don't trust it, and that mistrust was recently proven right again [3].

  So I'm currently looking to move the Ceph into WireGuard.

  Summary: For small-data use, tinc and Nebula are fine, but if you start to push real data, they break.

  [1]: https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc/issues/218

  [2]: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula/issues/637

  [3]: https://github.com/google/security-research/security/advisor...

• Which overlay network?
  6 projects | /r/selfhosted | 13 Jul 2023
• Tailscale/golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets
  10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Dec 2022

  From a purely networking perspective, there are far better solutions than tailscale.

  Have a look at full mesh VPNs like:

  https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

  https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-go

  https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc

  https://github.com/costela/wesher

  These build actual mesh networks where every node is equal and can serve as a router for other nodes to resolve difficult network topologies (where some nodes might not be connected to the internet, but do have connections to other nodes with an internet connection).

  Sending data through multiple routers is also possible. They also deal with nodes disappearing and change routes accordingly.

  tailscale (and similar solutions like netbird) still use a bunch of "proxy servers" for that. You can set them up on intermediate nodes, but that have to be dealt with manually (and you get two kinds of nodes).

• Tunneling to Synology NAS without opening ports.
  3 projects | /r/synology | 3 Aug 2022

  Two other options are Tinc https://tinc-vpn.org/ or Nebula https://www.defined.net/nebula/

• Port Forward Security & Alternatives
  9 projects | /r/selfhosted | 21 Jun 2022

  And there is Tinc; the OG overlay network. I don't have experience with this. Seemed a bit of a pain to setup. https://tinc-vpn.org

• WireGuard multihop available in the Mullvad app
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Apr 2022

  For what its worth I have used the open source Tinc VPN [1] for mesh multihop routing for ages. It is nowhere near as fast as Wireguard but I could envision Tinc incorporating support for Wireguard if the author were so inclined. Like you mentioned Tinc does not mesh with other VPN's AFAIK.

  [1] - https://tinc-vpn.org/

• You may not need Cloudflare Tunnel. Linux is fine
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Apr 2022

  This is actually very simple in concept and is just as simple or even simpler to do with tinc (https://tinc-vpn.org).

  Since I can use tinc in bridge mode, I can run tinc on the upstream server and on a local machine which then provides access to several physical machines without running extra software on each of those machines, which is particularly useful for machines that are resource limited, like my Macintosh LC II and LC III+:

  http://elsie.zia.io/

  It'd be nice if it weren't so difficult to get public addresses.

• Tinc Is Not Catan
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Feb 2022

  I clicked expected some broken analogy between https://tinc-vpn.org/ and the Catan board game, but instead it is a Catan implementation. Fair enough.

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