Hi thank you for helping me with my last issue (Sunlight remote desktop). Now I have encountered another issue VPN. I’d like to use Hamachi to play remotely with a friend (he’ll be using Moonlight to connect to my Linux PC) the problem is that he’s using a M1 Mac and Hamachi is not working on those. Maybe you guys have a better and open source alternative for Hamachi that’s also “easy” to setup and connect to.
Tailscale
It’s WireGuard based and it’s completely free for 100 devices.
I’ve used Hamachi for going on 20 years. Tailscale is the closest I’ve come for ease of use/setup.
It’s almost as easy as Hamachi.
Zerotier has been the best alternative in my experience.
I’ve tried Zerotier before and it doesn’t hold a candle to Tailscale.
ZeroTier pros:
- Exit nodes don’t break if I lose wifi for a moment
- Works with custom DNS setups out of the box
- Allow-LAN actually works on Android, rather, is the default
- No member limits for free
- No need to disown devices and putting them into tags to be able to set SSH ACLs
- Works out of the box with other overlay networks and VPNs
ZeroTier cons:
- No freemium tunneling feature
- No convenient browser-based SSH that only admins can use for some reason
- Not nearly as sexy
Candles are punching above their weight these days, it seems
On features ZeroTier > Tailscale, but the existance of headscale and ionscale brings me back all because ZeroTierOne is BSL, aka not FOSS.
Yeah, that’s a pretty huge con honestly.
My sheer frustration with all this tiny to grievous papercuts with Tailscale years on got the best of me— Even the Android Magic DNS bug only got fixed last month. But hey, I’m still using it, instead of ZeroTier so that’s something :D
Zerotier or Tailscale
Any open VPN protocol that MacOS supports will work. I’d actually say, you’re better off not using something like Hamachi. Keep in mind, allowing your friend direct VPN access to your network without any extra rules will allow them full access to everything on your network, so make sure you only allow traffic to things you want them to access.
Check if your router already has a VPN Server you can enable and let your friend connect to and set it up (easiest option). If not, just run the VPN server on your machine, and forward the port from your router to your machine.
Hamachi only does direct machine-to-machine connects, it doesn’t provide Subnet routing.
You could try Tinc but it’s fairly involved to get running. Pretty nice if you have a root server and want to get several people wired up, though. There are probably easier solutions for your use case.
Tinc is terrible
It’s awful to setup, and hasn’t been updated in years. Anything Wireguard, or Wireguard-based will be lightyears better.
Good to know. We initially set that network up well over a decade ago so my knowledge isn’t exactly current.
