Farewell to Meshnet
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
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NordVPN is shutting down its Meshnet feature, a peer-to-peer networking capability, sparking discussion about the feature's lack of visibility and potential alternatives.
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It wouldn't make me buy it, I'm just not in the market, but that's an insane feature to just not advertise. And its not surprising it never got much attention.
- My primary avenue for YouTube vids is Apple TV, which is the ONLY reason I pay for premium
- Honestly most of the creators I follow there make their ad reads entertaining enough that I'm not really bothered. I'm just emphasizing here I have heard a shit ton and a half of Nord ads, by a bunch of different creators, and I have NEVER heard of this feature. It's wild to me.
Don't know why they didn't just restrict it to paying subs or charge extra for it instead of getting rid of it, seems a stupid business decision that's going to cause lots of cancellations from subscribers that did use it and saw it as a differentiating feature from the competition.
At least when mullvad nuked port forwarding they conveyed their reasoning quite clearly (they kept getting legal claims for people hosting illegal content or torrenting).
One potential alternative might be to investigate https://tailscale.com/mullvad You can use tailscale for normal device->device routing, and add mullvad VPN as an optional outgoing ip gateway.
You still have to choose those devices in advance though.
“Each Tailscale agent in your distributed network streams its logs to a central log server (at `log.tailscale.io`). This includes real-time events for open and close events for every inter-machine connection (TCP or UDP) on your network.”
https://subnetsavy.com/wp-content/uploads/articles/headscale...
The post I was replying to is suggesting paying-for-Tailscale-Mullavad-mesh as a substitute for paying-for-NordVPN-mesh to which I say “yes, but”. It is a total non-starter to try and push most people into “install all this software, register a domain, set up this TLS automation, write this Headscale config, know what the config keys mean†, keep this machine up 100% of the time, stay on top of updates, don't get haxx0red” compared to “install this app, log in, and enter your credit card details”.
† Do you really expect the app-and-credit-card crowd (who are totally valid and deserve working mesh networking that doesn't spy on them!!) to know what even one of the keys in this config means? Really? https://github.com/juanfont/headscale/blob/main/config-examp...
I'd be interested to know which competing services exist that DON'T do the exact same thing in order to evaluate issues reporting by users or observed across multiple customer environments.
ETA: Not that it's probative, but here's an example of how Tailscale wildly differs from other VPN/Mesh networks: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/apenwarr_zscaler-ceo-just-ann...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44853709
As in, I've been using it for years and still do, it's sort of an integral part of my whole deal, but it also seems kind of unmaintained, I haven't checked on that.
And it's not the easiest to set up, but it feels miles ahead of whatever the Wireguard equivalent is or isn't these days.
The point of Tinc is basically OpenVPN but automatically meshes and there is no such thing as a "main server?" Just get them all to find any of the others, and everyone's connected.
Tinc 1.1 should make setting up easier; it has a CLI to set up and add nodes without having to manually edit config files. And you can generate invitation URLs which can make it even easier.
Meshnet is their peer-to-peer secure networking solution, not their conventional VPN solution. It allowed you to have multiple devices in your account directly communicate with one another, set a device as gateways for routing network traffic of devices connected to Meshnet (basically making your own VPN server), sending files directly between devices, and likely more I'm not aware of.
It was essentially their Tailscale / ZeroTier offering, but in the opposite manner to Tailscale which added Mullvad integration to provide a more conventional VPN atop their mesh network.
They are removing Meshnet, and the primary capabilities of NordVPN will be their global set of traditional VPN servers. Some of the features like P2P file transmission can be replaced by e.g. NordLocker albeit without P2P if I understand it correctly. But mesh networking is gone in December.
One of the possible configurations you could have in such a setup is one or more gateways to the internet. Much like the gateway on a traditional LAN, traffic bound for the internet would first go to the gateway.
In modern times, when people say VPN they're typically referring to a VPN with only a gateway and nothing else that all traffic gets routed through. NordVPNs Meshnet would be more similar to what a traditional VPN actually is, a means for separate devices to communicate as if they were local.
As NordVPN correctly points out, this is not new, not what most people using their VPN service are looking for, and for those that are, they're better served elsewhere.
That's not really true -- this narrower usage only seems to apply in the consumer-oriented VPN-as-a-service space. Every other context maintains the conventional terminology. Routers have VPN options, WireGuard and OpenVPN are advertised as VPN applications, businesses set up corporate VPNs to access on-premises resources, etc. All of these are referring to the standard meaning of VPN.
What you're describing as a "peer-to-peer secure networking solution" -- i.e. tunneling through the public internet securely to join your device to a LAN -- is what "VPN" actually refers to.
The "conventional VPN" solution you're referring to is just a secure forwarding proxy, which is only a subset of VPN functionality.
> It was essentially their Tailscale / ZeroTier offering, but in the opposite manner to Tailscale which added Mullvad integration to provide a more conventional VPN
What Tailscale and Zerotier offer is close to full VPN functionality, whereas Mullvad offers the same limited traffic forwarding service as Nord and also conflates that with VPN generally. A better way of describing this is that Mullvad adds a secure tunneling layer to the conventional VPN managed by TailScale.
> atop their mesh network.
There are no mesh networks involved in any of this. Mesh networking is a technique where low-level network topology is established via ad hoc handshaking between individual nodes, without central routers. None of these services are even operating at that layer.
As I said, all of the terminology in this space is muddled up pretty severely.
Same. Blanket advertising on half the YouTube channels I watch tips their reputation very mush towards "meh". I have no clue if they're ny better or worse than the average vpn company, but "the average vpn company" these days seems to be a super low bar - from things I read it seems they're mostly monetising by selling your privacy to data brokers or your internet bandwidth as "residential proxies" to ai copyright thieves.