It's extremely similar to Tailscale, and they are a major source of inspiration for a lot of the functionality.

The main difference is I am using a controller-less setup where each node maintains the state of their mesh via raft consensus. If a controller server goes down, another node will pick up the leader responsibilities. When requests come in that need to mutate network state, nodes will automatically forward the request to the leader node for you.

So kinda like a Tailscale - where you can disconnect and branch off at any time. Think...federated networks.

Samesies. Using three monitors on KDE for about 2 years now with no issues.

I am by no means an expert but the TLDR is Raft is a protocol that allows distributed systems to maintain a central state. The GitHub page on it is pretty good - https://raft.github.io/.

What it means for this project is that every single node keeps the database containing the entire network state (rules, addresses, routes, etc.) in-memory. At any single point in time, any of the "voting" nodes can become the "leader". The leader is responsible for authorizing nodes to join, mutating state, etc. If that leader goes away - another node will pick up the slack.

Hehe I'll respond to the edit.

I actually have a lot of respect for what TailScale is doing. 99% of their shit is open source and they don't get in the way of the downstream Headscale project that lets you run your own controllers. That being said, I think it gets pricey at scale and tries to do too much for the user. Extending it isn't super easy at the moment either, but they are working on ways of embedding their agents.

I wanted to take the idea and put it on the same level of distributed internet projects like Reticulum. I think this has potential to be the networking base for a concept similar to "dApps" but removing the financial incentives that come with using blockchain.

That all being said - I'm totally considering making a managed offering of this - and am actively looking for people who'd be interested to go on that journey with me. But I'd try extremely hard to never be labeled "corporate" :P.

Maybe? Quite possibly it seems. I'm not famiilar with it too much.

Almost certainly. At its core - everything happening could be accomplished with just regular configuration files. It's just a suite around maintaining the state basically.

I was considering adding FRR or BGP to the mix at some point - but it hasn't proven necessary yet.