Top all-time · #3548
Defined Networking
Company blog · defined.net/blogsystemsprogramming
Defined Networking is the company blog at defined.net, writing about systems and programming. Since 2021, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 27 times, most often “Nebula is not the fastest mesh VPN, but neither are the others”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-03, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (17) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link defined.net as the site of Defined Networking, which offers managed Nebula overlay networks, often listed as a Tailscale alternative. Comments also cite its Nebula benchmarks post.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 17 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Nebula Overlay Networks: Extend network access with on-demand, encrypted tunnels between any hosts on any network. Defined Networking is the company behind the Nebula open-source project.
Most-linked posts?
- /9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2021-09-18
- Nebula is not the fastest mesh VPN, but neither are the others2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-16
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-05
What Hacker News says?
There's https://zerotier.com , https://netbird.io , https://defined.net , https://github.com/tonarino/innernet and likely many more.
Comment linking /
on “Tailscale raises $100M”Submitted Nebula is not the fastest mesh VPN, but neither are the others as a story · 127 points
HN discussion> Shameless plug, but some of the Nebula team (including myself) works on https://www.defined.net/ (proprietary managed Nebula networks.) My one objection to Nebula is that its Android app is proprietary, and your response is to plug the even more proprietary way to run it? > Also, ZeroTier is "open-source ish." So it's not FOSS.
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on “Tailscale is pretty useful”Submitted Nebula is Not the Fastest Mesh VPN (But neither are any of the others) as a story · 13 points
HN discussionShameless plug, but some of the Nebula team (including myself) works on https://www.defined.net/ (proprietary managed Nebula networks.) Also, ZeroTier is "open-source ish." They use the BSL license for most of their code ( https://www.zerotier.com/blog/on-the-gpl-to-bsl-transition/ ) and I believe you can self-host ( https://docs.zerotier.com/selfhost/ )
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on “Tailscale is pretty useful”Submitted Securing the Keys to Your Kingdom as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHaven't used, but I believe lighthouses are primarily for host discovery (dns) + hole punching. I think if you configure static hosts on all nodes you're good: https://www.defined.net/nebula/config/#static_host_map
Comment linking /nebula/config/
on “How our free plan stays free”Submitted Defined Networking (Nebula) Is Open for Business as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNebula seems to be under Defined Networking ( https://www.defined.net/ ) now. It lacks the ease and tooling of the multitude of others that emerged in the space. My gut is that it's usable for the clever home user but meant for a professional IT dept with the ability/desire to build their own tooling and automation around it. The spartan mobile app is a sign of such. Tailscale is probably more easily usable for the…
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on “Tailscale Funnel”Submitted What's in a name? Giving Nebula hosts URLs as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAlso: WireTrustee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27672715 Netmaker: https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker Defined.net (from makers of Slack Nebula): https://www.defined.net/
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on “Headscale: Open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server”Submitted Bringing Nebula connectivity to everyone with free managed lighthouses as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNebula creators also started their own organization called Defined Networking to focus more on this networking: https://www.defined.net/
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on “Headscale: Open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server”Submitted Year of the IPv6 Overlay Network as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAnother great use of a personal VPN - I work at https://www.defined.net (which uses Nebula as the underlying VPN technology) and also personally use our free tier (up to 100 hosts) for everything. Having my Ollama instances available only over my VPN overlay network is very slick.
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on “Finding thousands of exposed Ollama instances using Shodan”Submitted AI infrastructure has a networking problem, zero-trust overlays can help as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNebula (a distributed mesh overlay network first developed at Slack) released their own network benchmarks today: https://www.defined.net/blog/nebula-is-not-the-fastest-mesh-... This is in response to this oft-cited benchmark post by Netmaker: https://medium.com/netmaker/battle-of-the-vpns-which-one-is-... Previous discussions on encrypted overly mesh networks here: "Would we still create Nebula today?" (Oct 2023) h…
Comment linking /blog/nebula-is-not-the-fastest-mesh-vpn/
on “Nebula is not the fastest mesh VPN, but neither are the others”Submitted Would we still create Nebula today? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou are in luck, there are many tailscale-esque alternatives: WireTrustee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27672715 Innernet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26628285 ZeroTier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28423466 Define.net: https://defined.net/ NetMaker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28147050 to name a few.
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on “Show HN: Onetun – Access your WireGuard network from anywhere”Submitted Relay Support in Nebula 1.6.0 as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThanks for the recommendation! I wanted a VPN like this for a long time, to manage HA in a remote propery, and this seems like a great option. Even the hosted service is very reasonably priced - https://www.defined.net/pricing/
Comment linking /pricing/
on “ZeroTier – home VPN without a public IP address”Maybe try Nebula? https://github.com/slackhq/nebula Or Defined Networks: https://www.defined.net/
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on “Mullvad on Tailscale: Privately browse the web”The team that built nebula at Slack actually split off and are building a similar type of network, that they give you a single pane of glass to manage, so you don’t have to manage a bunch of separate lighthouse devices manually. I evaluated it when going through the many available options out there a year or two ago, and it was still pretty green feature wise. Still very cool and could work very well depending on yo…
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on “Surpassing 10Gb/S over Tailscale”I've been looking at https://www.defined.net/ as an alternative. And also saw this on HN a month or so ago https://blog.janissary.xyz/posts/tailscale-oidc-authelia-car...
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on “A case for moving away from the cloud and embracing local storage solutions”I think Defined Networking[1] is also in this category, but I haven't seen too many comparisons. I have heard very good things. [1]: https://www.defined.net/
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on “Tailscale vs. Narrowlink”Hey me too and I fully agree! Nebula is super underrated in this market space. I use Nebula to connect my primary datacenter rack with a bunch of dedicated servers and VMs all together on an overlay network. This makes it easy for me to add Nomad client nodes quickly in different parts of the world and everything just works. I actually use https://defined.net for a managed Nebula experience and it makes everything s…
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on “Tailscale vs. Narrowlink”They actually have a (semi) hosted solution these days. I evaluated it for one of my projects but it was not fitting the bill for reasons outside of their control, https://www.defined.net/
Comment linking /
on “Globally Distributed Elixir over Tailscale”
