Hi there rodents,
I might need your help here to find something which seems to be as rare as a diamond.

Let me explain:
today me and my friends decided we finally needed to setup a vpn to play lan games, expose services like synchronized film streaming etcetera.
As per my advice, since low latency and ease of use are a must, we settled on wireguard.

After the vpn was on, we realized some games could not be played due to them strictly using broadcast to do participants discovery/connection. A shame, but we’ll just play something else.

Then someone proposed we search a solution to ease the pain we have in sharing files.
Since half my friends have a slow internet connection, uploading to a server and then downloading back would require too much time, so we opted for direct transfer programs.

alternativeto.net proposed programs as lanXshare, dukto R6, nitroshare, all of which unfortunately make use of broadcast to find peers on the network.
As already discovered, broadcast doesn’t work in the vpn, so we have no idea what software we could use that doesn’t connect to the cloud, nor forces us to have a share service on the server which hosts the wireguard central node.

I would like to avoid using ssh or ftp on everyone pc as well, since the majority of them uses windows and only have basic computer skills.

Does anyone have a program or even a tip which could help?

Thanks in advance!

  • SeerLite
    2·
    4 years ago

    Have a look at ZeroTier as an alternative to WireGuard for LAN connections. It’s also open source and has worked fine for me and friends when we used to play Among Us back when their servers were bad.

    • clockwise_bitOP
      2·
      4 years ago

      Well, it seems you found a solution to our problems, though I would have liked to see something working in traditional vpns as well!

      I waited for a bunch of more tech savy friends to come online and then we started thinkering.
      We all had our problems at first, not because of zerotier but because of our system configs.

      I, for example had to add broadcast and multicast input rules in iptables (I perfer having iptables block what is not used), then I had to add those routes to the virtual nic. The latter was more of a pain to discover, but fortunately tcpdump helped me find out when packets were travelling or not.

      iptables rules to allow incoming broadcast and multicast on a specific interface

      iptables -A INPUT -i <interface> -m pkttype --pkt-type broadcast -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -i <interface> -m pkttype --pkt-type multicast -j ACCEPT

      routing rules

      ip route add 224.0.0.0/4 dev <interface>
ip route add 255.255.255.255/32 dev <interface>

      Some of the others had some technical difficulties with the windows network settings: the “fix” which is discussed in the zerotier knowledge base was making their zerotier nic go bonkers.
      It turns out, for some unknown reason, windows was deleting the netmask after the priority was raised for the nic. They just put it back in place.

      Now, since both broadcast and multicast work (tried with tcpdump and multiple games), we tried installing nitroshare to share files as initially wanted and it worked like a charm!

      • SeerLite
        2·
        4 years ago

        I, for example had to add broadcast and multicast input rules in iptables (I perfer having iptables block what is not used), then I had to add those routes to the virtual nic. The latter was more of a pain to discover, but fortunately tcpdump helped me find out when packets were travelling or not.

        Ohh I had to do that as well! I forgot to mention it :/. I use ufw so I just did

        ufw allow in on ztwfumnihc proto udp to 255.255.255.255

        to get broadcast working (ztwfumnihc is the zerotier interface). I didn’t look into multicast because we didn’t really need it.

        I don’t know much more about networking/iptables so not sure what the difference is with what you did, but I think it’s the same.

        Some of the others had some technical difficulties with the windows network settings: the “fix” which is discussed in the zerotier knowledge base was making their zerotier nic go bonkers. It turns out, for some unknown reason, windows was deleting the netmask after the priority was raised for the nic.

        That sounds weird. I used it with a lot of people back then (>10), and no one ever came across this (if I’m understanding the issue correctly). When it didn’t work we just reinstalled and rebooted a few times, and it usually fixed it. Either that or we were really lucky :P

        Now, since both broadcast and multicast work (tried with tcpdump and multiple games), we tried installing nitroshare to share files as initially wanted and it worked like a charm!

        Awesome! I’m glad it worked well for your usecase! :)

    • clockwise_bitOP
      2·
      4 years ago

      I must say I was reluctant to try zeroTier because I misunderstood its ethics.
      One of the point I really wanted to have for granted was self reliance and I thought it wan’t the case with zeroTier.

      I was wrong, so thank you for your comment, you got me motivated to read the manual with more attention and I’m going to try it later this day!

      It could be not only a problem solver for some games like civilization 6 and among us, but also effectively for softwares like snapdrop ;)