Peers with no TUN?

[lonnietc]

Hello,

I read in the FAQ that you can run a peer without a TUN device is basically using the existing network connection from what I understand, right?

Also, if a person does this with one peer then they will not be able to communicate with other yggdrasil peers on the network which I would surmise that this is because those other peers are running with TUN devices.

My question is wondering if multiple nodes were set up with no TUN devices, then could those non-tun devices communicate with each other by themselves in a type of non-tun mesh network?

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

[perguth]

No, not having an interface just means that the node will only route traffic for others but not send/receive packages itself.

[neilalexander]

The TUN device is needed to send IP traffic over Yggdrasil. If you just want to forward traffic on behalf of other nodes (i.e. as a pure router) then you can disable TUN. You won't be able to send or receive any Yggdrasil IPv6 traffic if you do that.

Whether or not TUN is enabled or disabled does not affect peerings in any way. You can peer Yggdrasil nodes regardless of whether they have TUN enabled or not.

[lonnietc]

@neilalexander Thanks for the comments on yggdrasil and I will test it more.

I think that I actually still want to work with pinecone if I can get it to work and send some test messages. Maybe you can look at that one if you get a bit of time since what I really need is something like yggdrasil or pinecone that is an overlay network that does not need tun devices and uses existing network adapters for a small p2p project that I am working on now.

I need a relay mesh network that does not require users to setup a tun device for this particular project but another future project may require the tun installaion.

Thanks again

[neilalexander]

Right now the only non-TUN option that either Yggdrasil or Pinecone can realistically support right now is to be embedded into a Go application (where both can be used as a normal net.PacketConn, like UDP sockets are) or bound to Java/Kotlin or Swift/Obj-C using gomobile bindings.

[lonnietc]

Hi Neal,

Actually, that is exactly what I am wanting to accomplish to embed pinecone or yggdrasil inside a Golang application that I want to build since I will need to add more components. On the pinecone side I was thinking to take the cmd/pinecone/pinecone.go application or the cmd/yggdrasil/main.go and see if I could expand it to send messages to one node, multiple nodes, or all nodes with the untimate goal of having a private mesh network that for the peers to connect. This particular project is a type of private p2p ecommerce application which will also allow me to get better with Go as I am coming from a C/C++ background but like many features that I have seen in Go, especially the cross-platform abilities.

[lonnietc]

@neilalexander Thanks for converting this to a discussion.

I think that I will investigate both Pinecone and Yggdrasil independently since for the project then:

1. If Pinecone is used then it will be embedded in a Golang application as an overlay on the regular network for non-TUN which is what I really need and thus the discussion should probably be on the Pinecone Github repo (https://github.com/matrix-org/pinecone)
2. If Yggdrasl is used, actually for another project that will need a TUN device then this is the best location.
3. Also found Ironwood (https://github.com/Arceliar/ironwood) which seems to be a variant of Yggdrasil, but have not looked into it much.

Thanks and have a good day.

[lonnietc]

Hello All,

I think that I want to initially try Pinecone with no TUN device as it will work now in that way for connecting multiple nodes with each getting a RouterID.

@neilalexander I have been looking at https://github.com/matrix-org/pinecone/blob/main/cmd/pinecone/main.go

Can you please show me how to extend this to send a message to another node using the RouterID for the other node?

If I can get this to work then I will also investigate Yggdrasil more to see if it will help in the project as well, but need some basic example to send messages since there is no real documentation to speak of that explains this.

Any help would be truly appreciated.
Thanks and I eagerly await your response.