Subspace – A simple WireGuard VPN server GUI

https://github.com/subspacecommunity/subspace

by jamilbk • 6 years ago

315 92 6 years ago

github.com

lykr0n• 6 years ago

I giggled at this project name.

Seriously. This is cool. CLI rules all, but man, sometimes it's nice to use a GUI.

hawski• 6 years ago

In my early Linux days I remember Subspace Continuum a 2d MMO space ship battle game. I did suck at it, but it was massively interesting.

icholy• 6 years ago

What's the deal with the fork?

jamilbk2• 6 years ago

The original project [1] hasn’t seen any commits in a year.

[1] https://github.com/subspacecloud/subspace

DCKing• 6 years ago

Great news this was forked. It was pretty clear the previous project was not really a project but a code dump (still: thank you to the original devs for sharing this with the world!), and so I refrained from using it. Really great this has become a more open project with continued development!

rubatuga8• 6 years ago

Is there anybody interested in building or using a service that routes static public IPs to self-hosted servers, over WireGuard? I made a prototype a week ago, here's the homepage:

https://hoppy.network

I realized that I didn't want to ever deal with port-forwarding, NAT, or dynamic DNS and decided to create this. Message me if you want a signup link.

PaulBGD_• 6 years ago

Not to oversimplify, but it's like a VPN that you have access to all the external ports on the IP?

rubatuga8• 6 years ago

Plus it's static, supports roaming, and you get an IPv6 as well.

1cvmask• 6 years ago

Do you have any milestones till you take this commercial?

rubatuga8• 6 years ago

I need to create installation scripts that bring up the WireGuard interface without changing the server's routing table.

Then I need to do documentation, figure out pricing/billing.

kortilla• 6 years ago

Is this any different from something like the public IPs on NordVPN?

rubatuga8• 6 years ago

Yes, NordVPN doesn't do hosting, and it costs >$150 USD a year total for their public ips.

jo909• 6 years ago

I'm sure there is and will be demand for good static IPv4 tunnel brokers. I'm personally fine with dealing with dynamic DNS and port forwards for my home setup for now, but once I no longer have a public IPv4 assigned I would be a potential customer.

How do you deal with the global scarcity of IPv4-addresses that you would need to scale your service? I think this can only work long term if you own the address space yourself and are not dependent on some specific provider or cloud.

Also very important is a local endpoint to get a reasonable end to end latency.

OJFord2• 6 years ago

Yes, but just to check / point out that I don't think it's clear in current docs.txt (I know you said they're still WIP) - the 'hoppy server' that I add as a peer would be routed straight through to my own right, as in the public key for 'ca1.hoppy.network' is generated by me?

Or do I have to add a peer that's out of my control, which you use for routing between the two that are under my control?

rubatuga8• 6 years ago

It's the latter, you peer with Hoppy, and then connections to your assigned public IP simply use Hoppy as a "hop" before arriving to you.

danmur• 6 years ago

Great idea for a service! I do this for a bunch of personal services I host in le basement, where I don't want to either have any ports open it even expose my ip.

xrisk2• 6 years ago

I tried your service and it just works™, which is great. But a couple of points:

1) I saw that you're basically using one OVH box per IP. How do you plan to ever monetize this then?

What prevents a user from creating their own VPN instance on their own box and port forwarding from there? Granted this process is somewhat involved, but the kind of user who needs to do this is likely to be somewhat technically inclined anyway. (Some ideas: negotiate long-term deals for IP addresses and try to map > 1 IP per box / remove the static IP guarantee and keep a rotating pool of addresses – public IPs are more valuable than static IPs anyway IMO and you can integrate dynamic DNS into your service)

2) How do I know that you're not sniffing my traffic? Granted that most traffic being encrypted these days is a thing, but still I think it's a genuine concern.

3) I live in Asia, so latency was off-the-charts for me. (On the order of 500ms). But this problem could easily be solved by introducing servers in more locations.

rubatuga8• 6 years ago

1) I have monetization figured out. That's as much as I'll say for now.

2) that's a hard question, mainly because if I was using this service I would ask the same thing. Personally, I think a strong mission statement, privacy policy, and maybe a warrant canary would be good enough. At least with a strong privacy statement, I would be legally bound to never sell/peek at your data which is loads better than current ISPs.

I can't do much better than promise I wouldn't.

3) Did the Chicago server fare any better?

Also, thank you for the comments! I really appreciate them.

stiray• 6 years ago

2) Would be a show stopper for me. You need to solve this issue...

tyingq• 6 years ago

On #1, OVH does charge a $3/IP setup charge, but then does not charge monthly per IP so long as it's routable...up to a full /24 per server. https://www.ovh.com/world/dedicated-servers/free-ips.xml

Alternatively, their VPSs are dirt cheap. $3.35/month.

pkaye• 6 years ago

2) How do I know that you're not sniffing my traffic? Granted that most traffic being encrypted these days is a thing, but still I think it's a genuine concern.

How does this work? I thought WireGuard encrypts the traffic?

dmayle• 6 years ago

There's already a service that supports this general concept called NGrok ( https://ngrok.com/ ).

They support plaintext tunnels for free, and encrypted tunnels starting at eight dollars a month.

I cam across the service when learning how to accept incoming traffic on kubernetes.

rubatuga8• 6 years ago

That's true. However, ngrok adds a lot of restrictions like "40 connections a minute", or capping the number of port forwardings. It's unclear if ngrok support port 25 either. Also, paying a premium for encrypted transport in 2020?

atonse2• 6 years ago

ngrok paid for itself in time saved within my first half an hour of using it. Excellent product.

I use it to develop a lot with twilio and salesforce callbacks.

sa12• 6 years ago

Tailscale also does this well.

rubatuga8• 6 years ago

Tailscale does not provide public IPs. They use non routable addresses.

https://tailscale.com/kb/1015/100.x-addresses

NickBusey• 6 years ago

HomelabOS also has this functionality.

mrkurt• 6 years ago

Whoah this is super cool.

mmm_grayons3• 6 years ago

I'm curious, how does one go about obtaining IPv4 address space these days? I thought it had become quite a pain, and usually expensive enough to need serious cash?

api2• 6 years ago

There are auction services, but its not cheap. V6 address space is basically free.

jamilbk2• 6 years ago

Interesting -- bookmarked! I've had a need for something like this from time to time.

Is there any concern over people using your service for illegal/unfavorable activities like torrenting? Or are you planning to keep logs to provide to law enforcement requests?

choward• 6 years ago

Is there anybody interested in building or using a service that routes static public IPs to self-hosted servers, over WireGuard?

I don't get how this helps me "build" a service. Can't find source code anywhere.

On a related note the whole reason I self host is so I don't have to rely on things I don't control so there is no way I would use something like this. Defeats the purpose of self hosting IMO.

resume3843• 6 years ago

Control is one element of self hosting, albeit full control may be difficult to obtain and also maintain speed and privacy. Pushing your ingress out to an edge node affords interesting properties. One of which is privacy (keeps your home ISP IP hidden from the public.) A service like Cloudflare gets you the same for browser traffic, a service like hoppy can work for all ports, email, ssh, voip, etc. Control can and perhaps should be implemented not at the channel layer but through cryptographic means such as authentication and end to end encryption.

resume3843• 6 years ago

Hey cool! Nice job, I'm been working on nearly the same thing, been using it for a bit and find this pattern has really nice properties, like it's great to access my servers at local network speed (ssh, file copy, etc really fast,) having the option to easily move the server to another network, adding something like cloudflare to the mix I'm thinking one could host quite well from home. What is the use case that inspired you to build it? I'm really curious to see what interest and dynamics you find. It would be great if you could post an update as things progress.

GordonS• 6 years ago

Maybe I'm been daft, but I can't quite work out what this is for? I think it's to allow tunneling to a home server when you have a dynamic IP?

resume3843• 6 years ago

Pushing your ingress out to a full internet node simplifies behind the NAT/dynamic IP hosting. Once you have a static IP and no NAT or port restrictions it's much easier to run a from home personal cloud system.

..that might go something like this...

Raspberry Pi at home running docker containers with a reverse proxy like Nginx or Caddy. The Pi is set to automatically connect to the wireguard service once it has a network connection. The hosting server with the external public IP forwards port 80/443 browser traffic to the Pi sitting in your home LAN. Your domains can be mapped through Cloudflare to the public IP of your external server for an extra layer of privacy and caching. Requests to your Pi webserver reverse proxy through other containerized services on the Pi or to other hosts within your private home network running services like Wordpress, GOGS, Express Node app, Verdaccio (npm cache/proxy,) pretty much anything. Things get even more interesting if you run a reverse proxy on the remote server. It's also great to have a static public address by which to reach and manage your internal servers via ssh.

ochronus• 6 years ago

Kudos! Nice work, I hope this helps with the adoption of WireGuard

PeterStuer• 6 years ago

Anyone else thought of 'Subspace', the pioneering internet multiplayer space shooter from the 90's that was in many ways ahead of it's time? Great times were had.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)

Daishiman• 6 years ago

What became of it?

jalada• 6 years ago

It's still a thing, it was re-released on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...

elric• 6 years ago

It's still being played. There are some plans to write an android client (notably by Trench War's poid, on patreon as quantumspace). Its golden days are long gone, but it's not uncommon to find games with 40 active players in Trench Wars these days.

PH00• 6 years ago

For anyone who liked Subspace checkout Airmash:

https://airmash.online/

Originally released on HN. The game was abandoned by the developer. Entire thing was rewritten by the community and refuses to die.

Lots of fun and great people involved. Keyboards can take a bit of a beating though.

tiborsaas• 6 years ago

No, I had a nastier association :)

cyborgx7• 6 years ago

Yup, same here.

reading-at-work• 6 years ago

Surprised I had to scroll this far to find this - same here!

dnr• 6 years ago

Yup! I had many (many) hours of fun, and got pretty deeply into the development community that sprung up after the publisher abandoned it. I learned a lot from that and it definitely had an effect on my career.

schrectacular• 6 years ago

I came here to say the same lol! I remember vividly playing that game as a young boy at the local University computer lab and my jaw hitting the floor. Could never get good enough connection over dial-up to overcome the frustration. Still play continuum some, it's still the same and still amazingly fun.

boringg3• 6 years ago

This ^^^. Posted comment before I read all the comments :). Great time indeed. The tolerance for lag in that game was unreal but also, it played incredibly well considering most people were on dial-ups!

joadha• 6 years ago

Yep! Weirdly, I didn't get into it until the mid-00's when my older brother showed me Continuum. The game is still fun today!

naggie2• 6 years ago

Shameless plug time: those interested in subspace might want to check out a project of mine: dsnet https://github.com/naggie/dsnet/

dsnet is a simple wiregard management command that manages key generation and IP allocation, generating config files. I'm using it for a few networks at the moment.

I recently tried to add decent documentation and a blog post in the hope that it's useful to someone. I should so a Show HN really.

Here's the blog post: https://callanbryant.co.uk/blog/how-to-set-up-a-wireguard-vp...

piquadrat• 6 years ago

This looks very interesting, thanks.

Side note, any particular reason for having `user-select: none` set on your blog? That seems somewhat counterproductive for a blog with code examples...

naggie2• 6 years ago

This looks very interesting, thanks.

I'm glad you like it.

Side note, any particular reason for having `user-select: none` set on your blog? That seems somewhat counterproductive for a blog with code examples...

Ah -- that's not intentional. Thanks for letting me know, I've pushed a fix!

I developed the hugo theme for something else where it made sense (a portal) then converted it for use with my blog and missed that.

terrywang2• 6 years ago

Ah, this is a fork, NOT the original. I came across the original subspace long time ago when switching from strongSwan (IPsec based VPN) to WireGuard for my own good. There has been no development work for the original project in a while.

If you are looking for user friendly web UI for quickly building a VPN for remote access (encrypting traffic / data path between the device and Internet), with easy client management (scan the QR code for client profile thingy) try

- wg-access-server [1]

- wg-gen-web [2]

- wg-ui [3]

They all work well in a containerized fashion, all created around the same time when WireGuard was merged into Linux kernel mainline ;-)

Simple script worked better for my remote access use case for now, for use cases at scale I'd seriously take Tailscale into account (100 clients for personal - free account).

[1] https://github.com/Place1/wg-access-server

[2] https://github.com/vx3r/wg-gen-web

[3] https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/wg-ui

oregontechninja• 6 years ago

Pretty sure this is a fork because the original has arbitrary user limits due to it wanting to be a commericial product. Que hundreds of forks with the user limits removed.

Angostura• 6 years ago

'Cue' not 'Que' - just in case you want to use the word in more formal circumstances.

elitistphoenix• 6 years ago

Which one would you recommend?

terrywang2• 6 years ago

I'd recommend wg-access-server to start with (the one web UI that I tried first), fundamentally they are pretty much the same, just UI style difference.

BrandoElFollito• 6 years ago

I am a happy user of the mentioned wg-gen-web (https://github.com/vx3r/wg-gen-web), it helps enormously to manage WG profiles and most importantly sites only this.

Specifically it written not try to manage your firewall and whatnot (how to do that is explained, though).

unixhero• 6 years ago

Could anyone refer to a definite guide to what Wireguard is, what painpoint it solves and effective applications of it?

What kind of magic can I use it for to pipe data around securely in my AWS fortress?

danielbln• 6 years ago

It's pretty clearly stated on the landing page of their website: https://www.wireguard.com/

- simplicity

- sound crypto

- minimal attack surface

- high performance

- well defined

boringg3• 6 years ago

Let's be clear here. Subspace is and always will foremost be a fantastic massive online game from the late 90s. See wikipedia for more info. Slight disappointment that it wasn't related.

hu3• 6 years ago

I had no notion about the Subspace game and as time passes my parcel of the population will only grow relative to people who do know the Subspace game.

It's not fair nor feasible to reserve names permanently.

boringg3• 6 years ago

It's cool - I'm having fun with nostalgia.

econcon• 6 years ago

Anyone who uses wireguard UI on Mac? I tried downloading it from app store, with error " unable to download to Macintosh HD "

I am only one version behind the latest Mac, so what could be the problem?

microcolonel2• 6 years ago

Cool, the slick SSO feature means this may be a good choice if I want to set something up that I won't have to support until the day I die.

I like how many choices there are for off-the-shelf configuration generators.

simias3• 6 years ago

I don't mind the wg-quick command line interface but I must say that the #1 thing that bothers me with wg is that the private keys are stored directly in the config. That means that every time I add a new users the keys are plainly readable on my screen.

Is there a simple way to work around this issue? Can I include the keys from a 3rd party file for instance? I guess I could always just pre-process the config file to generate the final one from multiple sources.

BCM43• 6 years ago

PostUp should do what you want. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/WireGuard#Store_private...

I have it grabbing a key from AWS Secret Manager, haven't had a problem with that.

atonse2• 6 years ago

In case others got confused by this thread (I thought for a minute "how do you know which private key goes with which peer", is PostUp per peer, etc)... There is only one private key per interface on the server (or anywhere for that matter) and all the other peers are public keys.

I might be the only one who confused myself :)

simias3• 6 years ago

That's perfect! Thank you.

cyphar• 6 years ago

What I do is that I have scripts to manage the configuration file, rather than manually editing it. So you never open the configuration file in a terminal in order to see the private key.

djsumdog• 6 years ago

Interesting. I wonder if it re-creates the connection each time you login.

The biggest issue I have with Wireguard is that it's not set up for Roadwarriors. If you have an endpoint with a dynamic IP address (like your home router), but you give wireguard a DNS name, it doesn't store the DNS name. It only stores the resolved IP address.

The official solution is a script they have in their contrib repo that you stick in cron and it scans for changes and resets the endpoint if your DNS changes.

Wireguard also can't bind to a specific adapter on a multi adapter server. Since it doesn't respond with anything with unauthenticated packets, the official solution is that is shouldn't matter. Just iptables on everything and only accept packets on the adapter you want public.

The problem is, the egress packets will just go over the default adapter, so now you have incoming and outgoing packets taking different routes.

Overall thought, I like wireguard way more than OpenVPN. They still need to fix those and other issues though.

L_Rahman• 6 years ago

I setup Wireguard using Algo on a home server I kept behind a home router with no problems. It was definitely a dynamic IP because Comcast doesn't provide static IPs for residential connections.

Am I misunderstanding the limitation you're claiming?

mbreese• 6 years ago

I think the question is — does it still work when you get a new IP from Comcast? Even if you don’t have a static IP, your Comcast IP probably doesn’t change all that often. If WG stores the resolve IP instead of a dynamic dns domain name, you’d eventually have issues.

I’m in the same boat, but my ISP almost never changes IPs.

catalogia• 6 years ago

It was definitely a dynamic IP because Comcast doesn't provide static IPs for residential connections.

In my experience, Comcast IPs aren't contractually static, but they very rarely change. Months or years of having the same IP doesn't seem to be uncommon.

chrisallick• 6 years ago

Best video game ever.

abdulqabiz• 6 years ago

Not sure following is related to the post, but it might help a few like me who are still using High Sierra (macos), and can't use the official WireGuard GUI client (becuase it targets newer versions of macos).

You might want to check WireGuardStatusBar - https://github.com/aequitas/macos-menubar-wireguard

I like it over wg-quick (which requires sudo, and prompts for password all the time). The WireGuardStatusBar uses a privileged helper, so you only need to authorize it once and use it all the time.

Cheers.

Subspace – A simple WireGuard VPN server GUI

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