https://github.com/n0-computer/pigeons offers the same but with SSH. I use it in my homelab extensivelly for access, tunneling smb, postgres and some other minor bits.

Part of the n0/iroh team, cool to see this here, looking forward to play with it :)

One of the n0/iroh devs here.

Iroh doesn't use DHT as its main discovery mechanism. It uses DNS/pkarr and relays as the primary method. DHT is a separate feature if folks like to do that, we don't have it on by default and don't have it on the public relays.

The whole idea is p2p but trying to be realistic about what network environments actually look like.

There has definitely been a lot of blind-idealism in a lot of P2P systems, yea. Though sometimes that's because it was/is just a PoC to see if it works at all, and then it grows too large to change / needs to be forked.

Iroh is definitely near the top of my "play with it some time" list, that pragmatism is very important for building normal things that normal people will be using :)

> It uses DNS/pkarr and relays as the primary method.

Thanks for clarifying that. So does that mean Iroh still require a DNS server or domain name even though it doesn't rely on IP address?

I thought dial by key means the other party just need to be on internet and has the right key/pubic identifier then they can reached.

Where does the message resides if the other end is NOT online?

I suggest going through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwAt36Xe3UI for an explainer.

We bumped to 1.0 an hour ago https://pypi.org/project/iroh/#history

You don't have to have it public. You can have your app gate against any auth method you like to implement on top. And you can have private relays to segregate your traffic and discovery depending on setup.

Yes if you want to. Routers are a necessary abstraction from the IPv4 days and seems it will stick around for a long time, and we need solutions sometimes around those topologies.

Are you conflating a router with SNAT? Routers as in L3 routing are not an "IPv4 only abstraction."

Yes I used it in place of NAT for most casual users at home, which is presumably what the user above originally meant.

A little bit of both. Natively it relies on QUIC and leverages existing IP infrastructure, however it also works with custom transports just as fine so you can interact via bluetooth for example.

Establishing direct connections on the other hand is a much harder problem with the current internet infrastructure.

All the data is e2e encrypted and nothing is stored. The usual self hosting public things rules apply.