zlacker

[parent] [thread] 4 comments
1. Imusta+(OP)[view] [source] 2026-01-12 01:13:08
Hey, if tailscale is something you are worried about. There are open source alternatives to it as well but I think if your purpose is to just port forward a simple server port, wouldn't ssh in general itself be okay with you.

You can even self host tailscale via headscale but I don't know how the experience goes but there are some genuine open source software like netbird,zerotier etc. as well

You could also if interested just go the normal wireguard route. It really depends on your use case but for you in this case, ssh use case seems normal.

You could even use this with termux in android + ssh access via dropbear I think if you want. Tailscale is mainly for convenience tho and not having to deal with nats and everything

But I feel like your home server might be behind a nat and in that case, what I recommend you to do is probably A) run it in tor or https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm which uses iroh's instance but you can self host it too or B (recommended): Get a unlimited traffic cheap vps (I recommend Upcloud,OVH,hetzner) which would cost around 3-4$ per month and then install something like remotemoe https://github.com/fasmide/remotemoe or anything similar to it effectively like a proxy.

Sorry if I went a little overkill tho lol. I have played too much on these things so I may be overarchitecting stuff but if you genuinely want self hosting to the extreme self, tor.onion's or i2p might benefit ya but even buying a vps can be a good step up

> I was in another country when there was a power outage at home. My internet went down, the server restart but couldn't reconnect anymore because the optical network router also had some problems after the power outage. I could ask my folks to restart, and turn on off things but nothing more than that. So I couldn't reach my Nextcloud instance and other stuff. Maybe an uninterruptible power supply could have helped but the more I was thinking about it after just didn't really worth the hassle anymore. Add a UPS okay. But why not add a dual WAN failover router for extra security if the internet goes down again? etc. It's a bottomless pit (like most hobbies tbh)

Laptops have in built ups and are cheap, Laptops and refurbished servers are good entry point imo and I feel like sure its a bottomless pit but the benefits are well worth it and at a point you have to look at trade offs and everything and personally laptops/refurbished or resale servers are that for me. In fact, I used to run a git server on an android tab for some time but been too lazy to figure out if I want it to charge permanently or what

replies(1): >>CGames+E6
2. CGames+E6[view] [source] 2026-01-12 01:55:53
>>Imusta+(OP)
Thanks for the shout-out! If you have any experiential reports using QTM, I'd love to hear them!
replies(1): >>Imusta+N9
◧◩
3. Imusta+N9[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-01-12 02:16:24
>>CGames+E6
Oh yeah this is a really funny story considering what thread we are on, but I remember asking chatgpt or claude or gemini or anything xD to make QTM work and none of them could figure out

But I think in the end what ended up working was my frustration took over and I just copy pasted the commands from readme and if I remember correctly, they just worked.

This is really ironical considering on what thread we are on but in the end, Good readme's make self hosting on a home server easier and fun xD

(I don't exactly remember chatgpt's conversations, perhaps they might have helped a bit or not, but I am 99% sure that it was your readme which ended up helping and chatgpt etc. in fact took an hour or more and genuinely frustrated me from what I remember vaguely)

I hope QTM reaches more traction. Its build on solid primitives.

One thing I genuinely want you to perhaps take a look at if possible is creating an additional piece of software or adding the functionality where instead of the careful dance that we have to make it work (like we have to send two large data pieces from two computers, I had to use some hacky solution like piping server or wormhole itself for it)

So what I am asking is if there could be a possibility that you can make the initial node pairing (ticket?) [Sorry, I forgot the name of primitive] between A and B, you use wormhole itself and now instead of these two having to send large chunks of data between each other, they can now just send 6 words or similar

Wormhole: https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole

I even remember building some of my own CLI for something liek this and using chatgpt to build it xD but in the end gave up because I wasn't familiar with the codebase or how to make these two work together but I hope that you can add it. I sincerely hope so.

Another minor suggestion I feel like giving is to please have asciinema demo. I will create an asciinema patch if you want between two computers but a working demo gif from 0 -> running really really would've helped me save some/few hours

QTM has lots of potential. Iroh is so sane, it can run directly on top of ipv4 itself and talk directly if possible but it can even break through nats and you can even self host the middle part itself. I had thought about building such a project when I had first discovered QTM and you can just imagine my joy when I discovered QTM from one of your comments a long time ago for what its worth

Wishing the best of luck of your project! The idea is very fascinating. I would appreciate a visual demo a lot though and I hope we can discuss more!

Edit: I remember that qtm docs had this issue of where they really felt complex for me personally when all I wanted was one computer port mapped to another computer port and I think what helped in the end was the 4th comment if I remember correctly, I might have used LLM assistance or not or if it helped or not, I genuinely don't remember but it definitely took me an hour or two to figure things out but its okay since I still feel like the software is definitely positive and this might have been a skill issue from my side but I just want if you can add asciinema docs, I can't stress it enough if possible on how much it can genuinely help an average person to figure out the product.

(Slowly move towards the complex setups with asciinema demos for each of them if you wish)

Once again good luck! I can't stress qtm and I still strongly urge everyone to try qtm once https://gitlab.com/CGamesPlay/qtm since its highly relevant to the discussion

replies(1): >>CGames+9v
◧◩◪
4. CGames+9v[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-01-12 05:28:03
>>Imusta+N9
You aren't actually supposed to ever need to deal with tickets manually, unless you are trying to get a tunnel between two machines and neither can SSH into the other. It could be streamlined with something like Magic Wormhole, though. I'll add that to the backlog and see if there's interest. The normal way is to use SSH / docker exec / any remote shell to let QTM swap the tickets over it.

I've added an asciinema to the README now <https://asciinema.org/a/z2cdsoVDVJu0gIGn>, showing the manual connection steps. Thanks for the kind words. Hope you find it useful!

replies(1): >>Imusta+gY
◧◩◪◨
5. Imusta+gY[view] [source] [discussion] 2026-01-12 09:50:17
>>CGames+9v
well my use case is the fact of connecting two servers behind nat. If I were to be able to gain ssh lets say, then I could've simply port forwarded in the first place.

Wow the asciinema is really good and very professional, thanks for creating it, I found it very helpful (in the sense that if I ever were to repeat my experiment, now I got your asciinema server) and I hope more people use it

> It could be streamlined with something like Magic Wormhole, though. I'll add that to the backlog and see if there's interest

To be really honest, its not that big of a deal considering one can do that on their own but I just had this idea for my own convenience when I was using QTM

I really like QTM a lot! Thanks for building it once again, I would try to integrate it more often and give you more feedback when possible from now.

[go to top]