For quite a while now I've been using Pangolin Tunnels on a VPS to access my homelab services. It's been pretty solid for some months now, and it is a great FOSS alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels. But me being me, I wanted to try out something else.
That something else being Netbird.
Simply put, Netbird is a more open-source and non-VC-backed version of Tailscale.
Before Pangolin Tunnels, I was using Tailscale with a Caddy reverse proxy to redirect a custom domain to my homelab. But when I saw that Tailscale raised $160M earlier this year, I started to look for some alternatives. It's not because Tailscale got worse or anything, but because VC-backed stuff has a tendency to enshitify over time.
NetBird any good?
Honestly I couldn't tell you. I thought latency would improve because of the mesh feature, but it's about the same as Tailscale from what I can remember.
But latency isn't really that important to me since all I really need from my homelab is access to my calendar & contacts, RSS reader, and music server.
I will say that I've been having some trouble getting the NetBird container to work with Podman quadlet. I prefer using quadlets whenever I can in place of Docker. I recently learned about podman secrets, which has made me like Podman even more. But for whatever reason I can't get it to work.
This is non-working quadlet:
[Unit]
Description=NetBird container
Wants=network-online.target
After=network-online.target
[Container]
ContainerName=netbird
Image=docker.io/netbirdio/netbird:latest
AddCapability=NET_ADMIN SYS_ADMIN SYS_RESOURCE
Network=host
Volume=%h/containers/netbird-client:/var/lib/netbird:z
Secret=nb-sk-fedora,type=env,target=NB_SETUP_KEY
AutoUpdate=registry
[Service]
Restart=always
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target default.target
Maybe I'm not understanding Podman Secrets fully. Or maybe this is another case where the container has to run with root privileges.
I'll fiddle with this later.
In the meantime, the NetBird client is running using Docker Compose:
services:
netbird:
container_name: netbird
hostname: fedora
cap_add:
- NET_ADMIN
- SYS_ADMIN
- SYS_RESOURCE
network_mode: host
environment:
- NB_SETUP_KEY=<SETUP-KEY>
volumes:
- /path/to/containers/folder/netbird-client:/var/lib/netbird
image: netbirdio/netbird:latest
restart: always
TL;DR
Nothing wrong with Pangolin Tunnels, just wanted to try out Netbird + Caddy again.