Announcing Relays for DN: Connectivity in challenging situations

Last month, we brought you relays in nebula to allow you to achieve network connectivity in challenging situations. Now, we’ve added that functionality to DN to allow you to have full connectivity on your networks with minimal effort managing them!

To recap Relay Support in Nebula 1.6.0, relays are special hosts on the overlay network that allow hosts that are in tricky connection situations to achieve connectivity, when direct peer-to-peer connections are hard or even impossible. Relays allow these hosts to reach the rest of the network by delivering the packets for the host in an attestable manner that preserves Nebula’s end-to-end encryption between hosts.

Be sure to update your dnclient installation on each host to at least v0.1.5 to enable relay support

If you have a functioning network with at least one lighthouse, you’re done! Lighthouses will function as relays on initial network creation. This means that you can start up a DN network and have full connectivity out of the box.

Relaying traffic requires more bandwidth than a lighthouse’s normal duties, and while it may be fine for home users or non-critical applications to use lighthouses as relays, it runs the risk of overloading them. We recommend setting up dedicated relays once you have a larger network to ensure that you have separation of duties between lighthouses and relays for better uptime across your network.

To find out how to get started with dedicated relays in DN, read Using Dedicated Relays for Total Connectivity in the docs.