ZeroTier and DNS issues
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Interesting. I haven't looked deeply into Pertino because my business philosophy is to focus on doing what users want and what makes technical design sense and ignore competition. In fact, during ZT initial design I deliberately did not try any alternatives because I didn't want to "pollute" my headspace.
ZT may not need the DNS hack, since it doesn't use DNS to route traffic. It doesn't need any of that. It does everything a layer down using crypto for authentication and lazy route-learning with automatic switching and preference order. It's like VXLAN over a p2p mesh. It will fall back to WAN-in-WAN-out however if your LAN has rules that prohibit lateral communication... I've seen that in houses that run WiFi switches that do that.
It does seem like the DNS hack would help with the IP ambiguity issue though in mixed deployments, and mixed deployments are what most non-greenfield existing enterprises are going to want because they can't install SDN software on everything... either because they are risk/change averse or because they run a lot of things that are too old/slow/whatever to run it.
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adam, want to talk to you about a possible switch to your product sometime?
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Sounds like ZT is giving you free what Pertino is charging an arm for.
But yeah, I know Pertino still has a lot of other features as well.
Although - Adam, it sounds like you have the local vs remote problem already solved. You probably wouldn't need to do any of the DNS hacking that Pertino did, you've solved it through the crypto location hash.
Nice!
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Is ZT's goal to have control of all traffic like a SDN? What is the underlying design goal, just to be the ultimate VPN? That might be a major influencer of design decisions.
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@Dashrender said:
Sounds like ZT is giving you free what Pertino is charging an arm for.
Like he said... OpenSource. Think Linux and Windows
That's not a 100% true all the time thing, but you know, in general.
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What's the difference between a SDN and a full mesh VPN?
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Keep in mind that Pertino is a 100% of the time hosted service. It is never software on its own. You always get enterprise hosting that is globally load balanced. Doing the same with ZT wouldn't be nearly as expensive, but isn't free either. Pertino is paying the Amazon, Rackspace and Azure bills for you.
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@Dashrender said:
What's the difference between a SDN and a full mesh VPN?
Focus. The VPN is about connectivity. The SDN is about creating a single, monitorable network. Pertino is designed for you to build out applications on the platform that exist inside of the SDN.
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Pertino seems to have a lot of enterprise management features we don't have, and may or may not ever build. We've decided to focus intensely upon the "SDN everywhere" problem domain and do it right and that's our bread and butter as they say. We're targeting mobile, IoT, data center, and hybrid cloud as well as distributed teams and other VPN-ish use cases. (And tech hobbyists, hackers, gamers, etc. We've even had someone install ZT on an ARM Linux device in a drone and make the drone switch WiFi networks as it flies... said it worked decently well.)
@scottalanmiller Yes ZT is SDN, basically VXLAN over a P2P network. Here is a brief technical overview: https://www.zerotier.com/misc/2015-09-23_ZeroTier_Tech_Intro.pdf
@hubtechagain E-mail me at adam.ierymenko@zerotier.com and we can determine if that would work or not for your use case. (Also helps us decide what to build next even if it won't work.)
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@hubtechagain said:
and that was with design help from pertino. if a device/resource needs to be accessed off lan, stick a client on it. so our app/dc/sql/rds servers all have pertino installed on them. works great. local traffic still uses 10.x.x.x pertino uses 172.x.x.x
Hub,
Did Pertino try to talk you into installing (buying) Pertino for every device?If not, @scottalanmiller, why would they not push him heavily that way if the point is a full SDN or nothing solution?
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@Dashrender said:
If not, @scottalanmiller, why would they not push him heavily that way if the point is a full SDN or nothing solution?
To not lose customers
Pertino does end up being a super simple VPN compared to most other products. And free for ten and under makes it popular for small networks.
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@adam.ierymenko said:
Pertino seems to have a lot of enterprise management features we don't have, and may or may not ever build.
Yes, Pertino is all about the management. That's the goal, connectivity is a tool for getting there.
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@adam.ierymenko said:
@scottalanmiller Yes ZT is SDN, basically VXLAN over a P2P network. Here is a brief technical overview: https://www.zerotier.com/misc/2015-09-23_ZeroTier_Tech_Intro.pdf
Thanks!
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
If not, @scottalanmiller, why would they not push him heavily that way if the point is a full SDN or nothing solution?
To not lose customers
Pertino does end up being a super simple VPN compared to most other products. And free for ten and under makes it popular for small networks.
Touche!
Oh and where is that 10 user thing? I went to Pertino first when I needed a super simple VPN solution, but couldn't find it on their website, so I bailed.. then recalled ZT posted here.. found it, installed it and BAM I was golden.
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It's always been free for a small network. No idea, I've not looked in a really long time.
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If you have a link, I'll take it. All I see is this.
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I only know what people have been telling me. It was three free last I looked.
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What are the most common management needs you tend to see in the field? I assume once you have a network you want to do access control / identity management tie-in somehow (which we're looking at), and you want security monitoring of some form or another, but what else? AD / LDAP already does user management and most people are not going to switch their whole user DB over to another service, and companies like Chef, Puppet Labs, and Hashicorp are completely rocking the devops large-scale management side of things. I'd hesitate to try to compete with any of those on their own turf.
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@adam.ierymenko said:
What are the most common management needs you tend to see in the field?
I mostly work in the SMB space with SDN so the one really big thing we see is: nothing.
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Heh... in that case ZT will work fine if they can work around addressing edge cases like the aforementioned. If you are all-in on SDN you just use that as your LAN in which case it all works because it's all just a LAN.
The hairy legacy heterogenous things are the evil ones, but I suspect that's where a good chunk of revenue might be if you could actually do it well.
