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Show HN: connet – A P2P reverse proxy with NAT traversal

by Ingon on 1/2/25, 4:27 PM with 29 comments

Over the past couple of months, I've been working on connet. At this point, it is working pretty smoothly (in what I use it for), so I wanted to share it with more people and see what they think.

I know many other similar/reverse proxy solutions exist - like https://github.com/fatedier/frp, https://github.com/rapiz1/rathole, and a bunch more you can find at https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling. However, I wanted to try and put my own little peer-to-peer twist on it.

Thanks for checking it out, and sharing any feedback you might have!

  • by r3trohack3r on 1/2/25, 5:43 PM

    This looks great!

    Have you seen the libp2p project? Might help get you pluggable NAT traversal and transport strategies plus peer discovery. We’ve been using rust-libp2p for building an overlay network and have had decent success.

  • by rudasn on 1/2/25, 5:17 PM

    Nice. I really like the config format regarding the services available/exposed.

    Any particular reasons you haven't built upon wireguard that would handle encryption/security for you?

  • by crtasm on 1/2/25, 6:27 PM

    Suggestion for the quickstart: refer to the clients as either D,S or a,b throughout - I found the mixture a bit confusing.

  • by linuxdude314 on 1/3/25, 12:06 AM

  • by valorzard on 1/2/25, 6:40 PM

    Can I use this to host a Minecraft server? I’ve used hamachi and zero tier in the past, and the former USED to work but stopped recently for some reason

  • by nurettin on 1/2/25, 9:45 PM

    I have been using autossh in production for the past decade without problems. Does frp/ngrok/connet, etc. have any advantage that I don't know about?

  • by hailruda on 1/2/25, 7:20 PM

    So if I understand correctly, this should be comparable to what Tailscale is doing?

  • by Uptrenda on 1/2/25, 10:08 PM

    Spent 2 years working on the same problem. Ended up designing a library that does:

    - direct connect

    - reverse connect

    - tcp hole punching

    - turn support

    Has other features too like:

    - multi-interface

    - duel-stack

    - port forwarding and pin holes

    Show some love cause its at 64 stars and is IMO, objectively better for direct peer-to-peer networking than OPs library that only supports direct, reverse, and relay, and which doesn't seem to do anything to open ports or firewalls. It does make me salty that I try so hard with my own work but what seems to make people successful is their ability to get lucky on sites like this or game them.

    No offense to OP. Here's my project: https://github.com/robertsdotpm/p2pd