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I'm excited. Today was the first time I tried Sandstorm via their demo serivce, and I must say that I am genuinely surprised and impressed with the level of pol

I'm excited. Today was the first time I tried Sandstorm via their demo serivce, and I must say that I am genuinely surprised and impressed with the level of polish. One click gave me a private gitlab, a collaborative document editor, and even a running instance of browserquest! This level of polish might just be what it takes to get the masses to host their own digital services. I'm strongly considering setting a sandstorm server up for my family. One question promptly and prominently pops to mind: Given the focus on non-technical users, How does sandstorm mitigate issues that are caused by NAT and NAT traversal?

kentonv 10y ago
> Given the focus on non-technical users, How does sandstorm mitigate issues that are caused by NAT and NAT traversal? At present... not very well, to be honest. If you use sandcats.io (our dynamic DNS), you do have to open port 443, which means you need to understand router config. It would be cool to automate that with UPNP but we haven't gotten there yet. The prevalence of "hairpin routing" bugs in home routers is also a downer. :/ One idea I'd like to pursue someday is the one taken by IndieBox (no longer Googlable -- the one by Johannes Ernst): have a device which sits between your modem and your internal network, so that it can intercept DNS and make the server available at http://sandstorm http://sandstorm or whatever. Then do UPNP to make it externally accessible (if desired).
- goodplay 10y ago
  I wasn't aware of Sandcats.io. Thank you for mentioning it. While it doesn't address all issues, it does go a long way towards mitigating them. I must also take this opportunity to commend you guys on how transport security is handled; the fact that traffic remains secured end-to-end using a host certificate rather than terminating security at the proxy puts sandstorm well ahead of anything else in this space. Secure, easy, and open source. I'm sold as both a developer and an end-user.

kentonv 10y ago

> Given the focus on non-technical users, How does sandstorm mitigate issues that are caused by NAT and NAT traversal? At present... not very well, to be honest. If you use sandcats.io (our dynamic DNS), you do have to open port 443, which means you need to understand router config. It would be cool to automate that with UPNP but we haven't gotten there yet. The prevalence of "hairpin routing" bugs in home routers is also a downer. :/ One idea I'd like to pursue someday is the one taken by IndieBox (no longer Googlable -- the one by Johannes Ernst): have a device which sits between your modem and your internal network, so that it can intercept DNS and make the server available at http://sandstorm http://sandstorm or whatever. Then do UPNP to make it externally accessible (if desired).

goodplay 10y ago
I wasn't aware of Sandcats.io. Thank you for mentioning it. While it doesn't address all issues, it does go a long way towards mitigating them. I must also take this opportunity to commend you guys on how transport security is handled; the fact that traffic remains secured end-to-end using a host certificate rather than terminating security at the proxy puts sandstorm well ahead of anything else in this space. Secure, easy, and open source. I'm sold as both a developer and an end-user.