Yggdrasil Network(yggdrasil-network.github.io)
89 pointsby Velocifyer6 hours ago9 comments
  • postsantum4 hours ago
    Thank you, Yggdrasil, for being just a compact routing scheme, not a semi-governmental military solution for implementing horrors beyond my comprehesion (they just love nordic or lotr names for that kind of things)
    • cluckindan2 hours ago
      I thought the name is a Max Payne reference.
    • xeonmc4 hours ago
      ootl: what's the deal with hereditary purists and authoritarians appropriating nordic symbolism as dogwhistles?
      • johanneskanybal2 hours ago
        It's where all of western history comes from so it's not very strange to be popular overall. It's not like us mythology is a thing.
        • xhevahir2 hours ago
          All of Western history comes from the Nordic countries? News to me.
        • krapp2 hours ago
          >It's not like us mythology is a thing.

          It was before "Americans" came along.

      • krapp4 hours ago
        The Nazis were obsessed with a fictional occult quasi-mythology of the "Aryan" race that heavily appropriated Norse mythology and symbolism. The SS symbol was a pair of sun runes for instance.

        I think they appropriate Tolkien (who despised the Nazis and their corruption of "Germanic" ideals and Norse mythology) because a lot of them are nerds who don't read too deeply into it, like how right-wingers and conservatives enjoy Star Trek while being completely oblivious to its progressive ideology.

        • Arubis3 hours ago
          Venkat Rao noticed this and turned it into a rather excellent essay: https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/discworld-rules

          > The Lord of the Rings is a great story, but I have to say, I’ve never understood the strange hold it seems to have on the imagination of a particular breed of technologists.

          > As a story it’s great. It is pure fantasy of course (in the Chiang’s Law sense of being about special people rather than strange rules), full of Chosen Ones doing Great Man (or Great Hobbit) things. As an extended allegory for society and technology it absolutely sucks and is also ludicrously wrong-headed. Humorless Chosen people presiding grimly over a world in terminal decline, fighting Dark Lords, playing out decline-and-fall scripts to which there is no alternative, no Plan B.

          • EdwardDiego2 hours ago
            Thank you for the link, that was a great essay and now I need to reread the Discworld novels.
        • throw-the-towel2 hours ago
          Ah, the nerds, always itching to build the Torment Nexus from the classic novel Don't Build the Torment Nexus.
        • postsantum4 hours ago
          It's not hard to imagine what elf-rights were thinking of humans. Perhaps they even had a slur or two
          • krapp4 hours ago
            Definitely for the dark elves.
  • infogulch3 hours ago
    Is Yggdrasil still using raw truncated ed25519 keys to determine the treespace root node? [1] If so, this seems to be an obvious network availability vulnerability. [2]

    [1]: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/2021/06/19/preparing-for...

    [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27577201#27580938

  • mitchbob4 hours ago
    Earlier discussions:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42155780

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42158609

  • realreality4 hours ago
    It's been working well for me as a kind of poor-man's tailscale, connecting several VPS and several laptops.
    • MarsIronPI20 minutes ago
      I considered using Tailscale, but at the end of the day Yggdrasil is more inspiring to me. I like the idea of a network with no central authority delegating addresses. I hope that it takes off beyond just an overlay network. I'd be curious to try running it directly over some physical link without IP. Imagine if the world ran on something like Yggdrasil: anyone could plug in and get a publicly routable address. I think it would be great for decentralization and the open internet.
  • Karrot_Kream4 hours ago
    Does anyone run private services for themselves on Yggdrasil by allowlisting specific IPs and piggybacking on the routing layer? I've thought about doing this but haven't tried it.

    I wish TLS behaved better with private networks but I around certificates continues to mostly be oriented around the Internet.

    • MarsIronPI22 minutes ago
      I don't run services on Yggdrasil yet, but I use it heavily to get static, publicly routable addresses for SSH purposes. It's very nice because Yggdrasil automatically finds peers on the local network, so my addresses still work for devices on the same local network, if there's no uplink.
    • realreality2 hours ago
      Yes. All you have to do is whitelist your clients' yggdrasil addresses in your firewall.

      in pf syntax:

        table <yggdrasil> persist file "/etc/yggdrasil-allowed"

  pass in quick on tun0 inet6 proto tcp from <yggdrasil> to port $services
      • Karrot_Kreaman hour ago
        Have you had issues with bad actors flooding you? And how are your routes (when you're stationary?) Just curious
        • MarsIronPI16 minutes ago
          I actually don't have firewalls set up on my devices that run Yggdrasil yet (please don't crack me). I haven't noticed any brute-force attacks on my SSH servers yet. Though I really should set up firewalls.

          As for routing, I run my own node on a VPS, so all my edge devices are peered with that machine so routing is fine. Though when my machines are on the same network they automatically peer with each other directly.

  • woleium5 hours ago
    it’s been “new” fir as long as i have known about it, over 5 years or so? or is this a different thing?
    • OsrsNeedsf2P4 hours ago
      Doesn't look that active either. It unfortunately seems like there isn't a great use case for these networks that will adopt usage through the hurdles
      • pwndByDeath4 hours ago
        I don't recall the year but it was a long while ago, the developer and CJD from cjdns were chatting about ygg, very similar projects just different projects.

        The point was to put routing and privacy at the foundation of "the internet"

        It was mostly a response to the knowledge of prolific government and corporate spying. There are public nodes to piggyback on the legacy internet but it's another project that let's users build and control their own infrastructure, e.g. mesh-local

        Also see CJDNS, darknet project and hyperboria

        • yjftsjthsd-h3 hours ago
          Actually, could anyone compare this to cjdns? On the surface they seem pretty similar. Docs say:

          > Yggdrasil was created in order to build a decentralised routing scheme for mesh networks that can potentially operate at a global scale, motivated in particular by significant performance and scaling issues that were present in cjdns at the time.

          ( https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/faq.html )

          but that was a while back; where do they stand today?

      • akho4 hours ago
        Tailscale somehow found use for self-hosters, despite being wildly unergonomic for an all-Linux, non-corporate, network. Yggdrasil lacks marketing effort, but is otherwise a great option.
        • MarsIronPI12 minutes ago
          I actually use Yggdrasil in lieu of Tailscale because I love the idea of a decentralized routing system.
  • ajvs2 hours ago
    Was evaluating this recently, the lack of NAT busting was a dealbreaker.
    • Karrot_Kreaman hour ago
      You can make outbound connections to peers to avoid NAT.
  • Animats4 hours ago
    Not to be confused with the Yggdrasil Linux distro.

    (Sometimes being first doesn't help.)

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yggdrasil_Linux/GNU/X

    • cestith4 hours ago
      Yggdrasil was my first distro, but I was evaluating it and another one back to back. I ended up sticking with SLS until I got a RedHat Linux book with a CD in the back - at retail, in brick and mortar book store. The next couple were Caldera and Mandrake, this time in tidy cardboard boxes with multiple discs and multiple books each. I think I got those both at computer/electronics stores. The latency was high, but the bandwidth of driving home with 7 discs was hard to beat at the time.
    • mbirth4 hours ago
      Or the yggdrasil daemon from Red Hat:

      https://github.com/RedHatInsights/yggdrasil

  • lokar3 hours ago
    That is a remarkably content-free website. I tried (I think) all of the obvious pages, but still don't know in any detail, how do they handle routing differently from the normal internet.

    Can anyone explain? They complain that routing on the internet is (somewhat) hierarchical to scale, but then don't explain their solution to the same problem(s).

    The simplified choice has always been distance-vector, or link state. Are they a better attempt at one of these? Some new idea?

    • MarsIronPI13 minutes ago
      The novelty is that routing is based on cryptographic identity. Yggdrasil's IPv6 addresses are actually truncated representations of public keys. You configure the Yggdrasil software with a list of peers which it connects to over normal internet, but then when you route a Yggdrasil address your device talks to all its peers, who talk to their peers and so on until they find your destination. As I understand it, they optimize it by caching the routing information and using bloom filters to find the appropriate peer.
    • mrsssnake2 hours ago
      Picture this:

      You have three devices at home, A, B and C. Only device A have Internet connection and can connect to public Yggdrasil node. B can connect only to A and C. C can connect only to B. Have Yggdrasil installed on all of them (and tell Yggdrasil about the peers), all devices would have access to full Yggdrasil network.

      • lokar2 hours ago
        And? How is that novel? I read the site as saying the have a new, and better solution to how to do internet scale routing (in an overlay network, but that did not seem like a critical aspect)