[HN Gopher] The Promised LAN
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The Promised LAN
Author : Bogdanp
Score : 204 points
Date : 2025-07-23 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tpl.house)
(TXT) w3m dump (tpl.house)
| wylie39 wrote:
| Looks similar to dn42 https://dn42.dev/Home
| trygvis wrote:
| dn42 is really fun tinkering with, it feels very much like
| connecting to the real internet.
|
| The set of internal services is growing too.
| lostmsu wrote:
| How do TPL and mentioned here dn42 compare to Yggdrasil?
| ericdiao wrote:
| Really want to know the rationale of choosing IPSec over
| Wireguard. IPSec is really tricky to get right (IMO). Maybe
| legacy issue?
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| They probably use L2TP with IPsec to get Layer 2 transit. Doing
| that over Wireguard would require Gretep or something similar
| ericdiao wrote:
| Oh this make sense. For LAN, one definitely want L2. Totally
| overlooked the objective.
| smashed wrote:
| Not sure they are using l2 transit.
|
| They are using BGP and routing nodes (backbones), recreating
| a mini IP (layer 3) network I think.
|
| I've used raw wireguard in a p2p fashion to interconnect
| LANs. I run wireguard on each segment directly inside the
| network routers.
|
| Just make sure all LANs are using a different subnet. A /24
| is standard. Then configure all the peers and you get a fully
| peer to peer network. No relays. You only need one side of
| every peer "pair" to be reachable from the internet.
|
| I do have a small management script to help peer discovery
| (dynamic IPs) and key exchange, but it's not strictly
| required. With a dozen nodes or so, it's maintainable
| manually. Wireguard supports roaming natively, as long as one
| peer can reach the other.
|
| Very little overhead. ICMP, TCP and UDP support.
| icedchai wrote:
| I have my own Wireguard mesh network between my home
| network and a couple of VPSes. I configured it all
| manually, too. I'm basically running a virtual _public_
| network and have it routing a /24 (BGP announced at the
| VPSes) back to my home.
| LorenDB wrote:
| My personal choice for something like this would be
| Tailscale/Headscale. Runs over Wireguard and handles a ton of
| niceties like DNS for connected nodes automatically.
| ericdiao wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| I personally ran into the legacy setup issue for running
| vanilla Wireguard for my setup before Tailscale is a thing
| and have to manually manage keys, routing and DNS.
|
| But one thing Tailscale has that annoyed me is that they are
| using 100.64 CGNAT addresses (which is more RFC-compliant)
| but conflicts with one of my cloud service provider's pre-
| configured DNS, NTP and software mirrors setup. Using it
| became more or less messy for this reason.
| redn0vae wrote:
| This kind of defeats the purpose of TPL. Part of TPL is
| setting up your own network segment. There's a dashboard that
| shows who has what working.
|
| Part of the fun of TPL isn't just that your computer can talk
| to another computer, it's that you have your own setup
| configured form the ground up so your /24 can talk to other
| /24s on TPL. I 100% understand some people will not enjoy
| that and won't find it fun, and that is ok. Some people do
| enjoy learning new things about setting up infrastructure,
| and this scratches some of that itch.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I mean, this is pretty much the standard of setting up
| satellite offices for businesses and whatnot. Lots of people
| are extremely familiar with IPSec, it's not that hard.
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| No description of the games they even play? It's an interesting
| idea. But it sounds like one big "no girls allowed" kind of
| treehouse with how minimally forthcoming they are about
| documentation
| giantg2 wrote:
| Seems more like a semi-private friends-of-friends network. It
| wouldn't be surprising if it turned out to have skewed
| representations as most of these do by nature of the semi-
| private nature.
| cptskippy wrote:
| What gave you that impression?
|
| > The Promised LAN is a closed, membership only network...
| giantg2 wrote:
| I can't tell what you are trying to add to the conversation
| here, or of it's just sarcasm.
| cptskippy wrote:
| I was teasing you and the op because you both made hedges
| ("seems", "sounds") when it was very clearly stated in
| the very first eight words of the first sentence of the
| first paragraph on that site.
| dewey wrote:
| It doesn't necessarily look like something that was built to be
| submitted to HN or be interesting to outsiders.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| it's made clear from the outset this article is not attempting
| to recruit members, but to promote the concept
| TheFreim wrote:
| > But it sounds like one big "no girls allowed" kind of
| treehouse
|
| There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It's actually
| completely fine, and good, for people to voluntarily form
| social groups based on a shared interests and traits. The
| movement to oppose this sort of thing has been a large factor
| in the deterioration of social life for many people. You are
| not entitled to membership in a community of close-knit
| friends.
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| Where did I say any of that?
|
| I was just bemused at the webpage bragging about hosting a
| "24/7 LAN party" but then not even mentioning what _games_
| they like playing
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Idk, probably this part?
|
| > it sounds like one big "no girls allowed" kind of
| treehouse
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| "We're going to write paragraphs about how cool this
| project is but also it's all on the LAN and it's invite-
| only so don't ask"
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I don't see how this is any different from someone
| sharing a homelab setup or something.
| thoroughburro wrote:
| "A friend group with an idea to share"
| omnicognate wrote:
| Read the manifesto, linked there and in the comments
| here. Its entire membership is 19 close friends and they
| won't let anyone new join who hasn't already been friends
| with one of them for at least 10 years.
|
| They're just sharing the idea because they like what
| they've built and think other people could have fun
| building something similar. It's like a treehouse
| enthusiast putting some pictures of the cool treehouse
| they've made on their website. It's not an invitation to
| come and hang out in it.
|
| I'm tempted to make one of these, TBH.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| This seems like way to much effort for playing video games
| which can be done easier with discord. With how tight lipped
| they are with what their actual service is, it gives off file
| sharing vibes.
| qualeed wrote:
| Or, hear me out, it's just a group of nerdy friends that
| wanted to hack something together.
| redn0vae wrote:
| This is exactly what it is. There's no weird file-sharing
| stuff going on.
| redn0vae wrote:
| No games are played on TPL. It's more just socializing. There's
| IRC and stuff, and people host weird things.
|
| When you join TPL you get a generated LaTeX document with all
| your connection-specific details. That document breaks down
| kind of _everything_ you need to know to join, and then you're
| paired up with one of those primary backbone people to connect.
| xcrunner529 wrote:
| What an extremely technical friend group lol.
| redn0vae wrote:
| Yes, everyone is pretty technical. The author of this article
| (ptag) spends a decent amount of time helping the people out
| who aren't as well-versed in infrastructure/networking.
| PcChip wrote:
| This sounds really interesting and something I'd be into
|
| no word on how to join though
| thenoblesunfish wrote:
| Read the linked manifesto. I think the idea is to inspire you
| to set up your own, rather than join this one.
| mjg59 wrote:
| The idea is to be a space where existing social groups play,
| rather than a wider community - it's inherently based on a
| level of pre-existing trust. Writing about it is supposed to be
| an incentive for people to build their own little spaces where
| they can share weird stuff that should never be near the public
| internet - it's cool to have a network of thermal printers that
| people can submit jokes to, but it only really works if access
| is somewhat limited.
| pak9rabid wrote:
| The SIP "redphones" is an idea I really like. My wife managed
| to get a SIP IP phone from one of her buy-nothing groups that
| I've been meaning to setup an Asterisk server for just to
| mess with. Maybe stick it upstairs where my kid likes to play
| & let him get the experience of using a "real" phone.
| qualeed wrote:
| > _As a result, membership will never be open, and we will
| never have enough connected LANs to deal with the technical and
| social problems that start to happen with scale. This is a
| feature, not a bug._
|
| > _This is a call for you to do the same. Build your own LAN.
| Connect it with friends' homes. Remember what is missing from
| your life, and fill it in. Use software you know how to operate
| and get it running. Build slowly. Build your community. Do it
| with joy._
|
| From https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/
| Thaxll wrote:
| Sounds like they just reinvented internet.
| archi42 wrote:
| The page contains link to a manifesto/description:
| https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/
|
| I think that's a more interesting read than the linked page.
| flerchin wrote:
| Wow. This is the best part of it. Thanks.
| haddr wrote:
| Actually the manifesto is linked in the second paragraph.
| Reading this page and then the manifesto was good experience
| for me.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Thanks for linking that, I missed it when skimming the original
| link earlier. I find that quite a heart warming story which
| makes me want to set up something similar, I was particularly
| tickled by the thermal receipt printers for sending each other
| messages.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I really like this, no feeds, no algorithms, just a network to do
| cool stuff with like minded people. Things like this are the
| answer to people complaining about the current state of the
| Internet. Making a network and getting your friends to use is how
| it all started.
| mattlondon wrote:
| Hypothetically, it be possible to achieve the same thing with a
| shared tailscale network, right? But can you kinda "federate"
| tailnets like this? So independent tailnets owned and run by
| individuals, but networked together into an inter-tailnet?
|
| You miss the fun and games of running your own DNS infra etc I
| guess.
| cornholio wrote:
| Kind of disappointed that "The promised LAN" runs on IPv4. One
| man's promised LAN is another man's hell.
| xori wrote:
| I've been wanting to do this for ages. Originally I wanted to do
| this at the home router level, but that quickly got shut down
| when I got a test net up and running and my friends could control
| the Chromecasts in my house.
|
| For us a "tailscale" equivalent with SoftEther is what we used to
| manage the DNS/Tunneling for our fileshare/services.
|
| So cool to see more people playing in this space. Please post
| more! <3
| redn0vae wrote:
| Some people have just opened up their entire home networks,
| other people have VLANs set up and only share that VLAN with
| TPL. However, as written in the article, everyone knows at
| least a few other people on TPL and that interpersonal real
| life trust is what keeps people from screwing around on
| everyone else's networks. Everyone is also an adult.
| kentonv wrote:
| Heh, of all arguably-valid definitions of "LAN Party" I think
| this one is as far away from mine as you can get.
|
| Traditional LAN party: Everyone brings their computers to one
| place to connect via a LAN, where they play games, swap files,
| demo stuff to each other, etc.
|
| My LAN party: All my friends come over to my house and use the
| computers that I have already set up for them. Nobody brings
| their own. The point is to interact face-to-face, with video
| games as a catalyst. Swapping files and demos doesn't really
| happen since nobody brought their own computer. (My house:
| https://lanparty.house)
|
| The Promised LAN Party: The LAN is extended, virtually, across
| multiple houses, so that the participants can play games, swap
| files, and demo stuff without actually leaving home. It's
| arguably no longer "local" but functionally it enables the same
| activities as a LAN party, other than the face-to-face
| interaction part.
|
| I wonder who gets told their definition is "wrong" more. :)
| sleepyams wrote:
| This is a pretty amazing setup! I think in 2025 I would
| definitely prefer something like this. However, I think back in
| "the day" part of what made LAN parties fun was that everyone's
| PC was so individualized. I remember all of my high school
| friends and I coming of age and building our PCs. I helped a
| lot of my friends build their PCs and we all chose different
| things (such as the amount of RGB LEDs, which I thought were
| tacky...). I remember a friend of a friend had a water cooling
| system and I was so excited about checking it out. Also, things
| like the desktop wallpaper you chose, etc, contributed to this.
| There was something very magical about it all. Lugging our PCs
| to each others houses was a real labor of love.
| jimmcslim wrote:
| And a real risk of a shattered CRT screen! I remember carting
| my bougie 17" Viewsonic around in the back of my Hyundai
| Excel and wondering if it would pick up a crack along the
| voyage...
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Back in the hayday of lan parties in like 1995-1997 my only
| monitor was a absolute boulder of a 21" viewsonic (this is
| pre flatscreen or rather pre decent flatscreens, you could
| get like 15-17s but they were expensive and absolute
| trash). One night coming home from the bars, half drunk, in
| an alley my friend and I found an abandoned (maybe..)
| horizontal-able handtruck. Made the lan party load unload
| so much better.
| koolala wrote:
| People move far away but still want to participate in LAN
| parties.
| sneak wrote:
| To me, one of the defining features of a LAN party is a single
| broadcast domain. I thought that is what this was, at first,
| but it is actually an L3 overlay network with DNS and BGP and
| the whole nine yards. Somewhat a stretch for a LAN. :D
| 9x39 wrote:
| Absolutely. I think while plenty of games now can rely on UDP
| hole punching or file sharing can be done with centralized
| cloud storage, part of the earlier LAN appeal was sharing a
| segment together and all the ease that brought.
|
| OS's like Windows can easily share folders and printers,
| games (particularly older ones) run LAN discovery off of
| broadcasts, and the lot. Sure, sometimes you can route it,
| but when I think LAN, I think back to the wireless bridges in
| a neighborhood LAN between houses we would setup - ARPs and
| all, in a big messy broadcast domain that worked well enough.
|
| Today I think I'd reach for GRE tunnels to add that
| functionality if I was them. Otherwise, this is just the
| Internet with more steps.
| lucideer wrote:
| Funnily enough the (only) LAN parties I ever experienced "back
| in the day" were pretty similar to yours:
|
| 1. there was one smallish computer lab tucked under a stairs in
| the science department in university, in which all of the
| computers had been "compromised" in some fashion & games
| installed for student LAN parties. Mainly after hours for those
| living on campus.
|
| 2. In the first tiny little company I ever worked for we'd have
| them in the office on occasion.
|
| For your "traditional" types - how did people transport their
| computers? Laptops?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| You just loaded up your enormous full tower PC and 17 inch
| CRT monitor in the back of your friend's brother's cousin's
| friend's station wagon, and made it happen. I had a
| Rubbermaid tub that I would use to lug the tower and all the
| necessary cables and accessories. A properly gaming-specced
| laptop would have been absurdly expensive (they still are)
| and a bit like cheating anyway.
| darrylb42 wrote:
| I had a lanboy? case that came with a carry strap. The case
| was also mostly aluminum so it was pretty light. Not many
| people had laptops back then. Managers at work maybe had
| one. Most people had a proper desktop.
| meling wrote:
| Interesting! I grew up before network cards was a thing in home
| computers (Commodore 64 and Amiga), but a group of my friends
| organized what we called <<meetings>> which I would
| characterize as your traditional LAN party. I remember at some
| point that we hooked up two Amigas over a fairly long parallel
| cable and were able to send data across. Cannot recall if we
| actually were able to copy larger files between them though.
| Fun times!
| hkon wrote:
| I think your definition/setup is the wrongest as it does not
| capture the spirit. You have a cyber cafe.
| starkrights wrote:
| It doesn't capture the spirit of a group of friends getting
| together to play video games in a shared space? Or there's a
| different definition of the LAN party spirit that somehow
| entirely precludes that aspect?
|
| Like I could understand saying it misses out on the aspect of
| literally bringing your individual PCs, missing out on the
| neatness of everyone's individuality as another commenter
| pointed out, but I don't think they'd agree that the in
| person, gaming in the same place aspect is entirely precluded
| from "the spirit"
| hkon wrote:
| You are trying to deconstruct something, keeping part of it
| and calling it the same. You seem to be making my argument
| for me, so I have nothing to add.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think the spirit is people playing computer games with each
| other in the same room. I don't think it really matters who
| owns the computers.
| ajcp wrote:
| Big fan of both your LAN houses! One thing I noticed is that
| you don't seem to have any art/pictures/decorations on any of
| your walls. Is that an intentional choice?
| brudgers wrote:
| If you aren't using IPX/SPX, it isn't a _real_ LAN party.
|
| Or there's true Scotsman all the way down to the turtle.
| endgame wrote:
| Hybrid LANs are also pretty good. During the Christmas-New Year
| break, old school friends would often have a LAN party with
| ZeroTier or similar set up, so people who couldn't make it
| could still drop in and out. You'd get a great LAN party vibe
| from the room full of PCs and ethernet cables everywhere, but
| you'd also get much higher player counts. Everyone wins.
| ericdiao wrote:
| Haha, have to drop the link to the recent Linus Tech Tips video
| on your house!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97Y0MVUgjOw
| joaohkfaria wrote:
| Creating all of this is cool, but I don't know, it looks like a
| gimmick.
|
| The whole argument is: "Every other page I find myself on now has
| an AI generated click-bait title, shared for rage-clicks all
| brought-to-you-by-our-sponsors-completely covered wall-to-wall
| with popup modals, telling me how much they respect my privacy"
|
| Well, you'll still need content outside your friends group. Even
| with the "Promised LAN" you'll continue having the same
| experience.
|
| And what for? What are the use cases? Exchange files? Jokes?
| Chatting? The examples given: "It's incredible how much network
| transport and a trusting culture gets you--there's a 3-node IRC
| network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage
| swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of
| "redphones"."
|
| Ok, fun. But you'll still need WhatsApp/Facetime to talk to your
| mom, the whole internet to search and learn, sometimes social
| networks to communicate or to get a job, etc etc etc.
| benreesman wrote:
| Eh, I'm not sure how gimmicky it is. Without knowing how it's
| used, maybe the use of the network itself is just for fun, and
| nothing wrong with doing computer stuff for fun!
|
| But the networking chops to set something like this up are
| super practical. My current project has forced me to go from "i
| know how to use sockets in serious applications" to "i run GCE
| instance snapshots unmodified in a kernel-level TAP web of lies
| with tricky DNS overlaid to migrate complex workloads that
| can't go down to bare metal instances colocated in weird
| places". This is a pretty radical shift in perspective for a
| historical "network stuff, got it" guy like me.
|
| In the words of that guy from the 10x programmer meme video:
| "cloud edge is a hype!" The cloud is terrible in 2025:
| arthritic Xeon SKUs no one wants marked up 10000%, FinOps is
| like a casino that knows the whales need to neither win too
| much nor lose too much: they have active calls to action when
| the grift is so insane that they know you'll eventually do the
| books and churn out forever. The security theatre around IAM
| and shit is like going to the DMV, it's a whole thing to make
| an S3 bucket now.
|
| There are bright spots: fly is the perfect tool for a busy
| admin who needs to keep an eye on a bunch of prompt engineers
| with docker and confidence, but for the most part?
|
| Going back to bare metal is just a strict upgrade, and once you
| do that, knowledge like the knowledge these folks have from
| operating this thing? It becomes a whole new set of superpowers
| over and above standard out of the box networking. Standard
| networking is great when it meets your needs, but if it's all
| you know, you don't realize how big on an appetite your
| business has for wizard stuff.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Seems like this is a perfect opportunity to throw out all that
| custom jiggery pokery and just replace it with
| tailscale/wireguard.
| zrail wrote:
| It's not really custom. It's industry standard protocols for
| connecting independent (one might say "autonomous") networks.
|
| Tailscale is this on easy mode, of course. There's a blog post
| by apenwarr somewhere that I can't find right now that lays out
| the fundamental thesis of Tailscale and its very similar to
| these folks' manifesto.
| redn0vae wrote:
| The custom jiggery pokery is the point. This is like telling
| someone to throw away their hobby car they work on over the
| weekends and replace it with a new electric vehicle because
| it'll, "Just work." The configuring things, understanding the
| infrastructure, that is _the point_.
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(page generated 2025-07-23 23:00 UTC)