linsomniac 8 hours ago

I spent some time on Friday trying out Cloudflare tunnel and boy was it a bad experience. The big killer was that the tunnel endpoint they gave me had an IPv6-only endpoint that I'm not sure was even valid. None of my devices could connect to it, including macbook, phone, linux, AWS instance...

On top of that I keep running into unexpected roadblocks with Cloudflare, like when I was trying to set up the tunnel they required me to set up a dedicated domain, you can't set up a subdomain of an existing domain. Probably fine if you are rolling it out as a production service, but for just testing it to make sure it even works (see IPv6 comments above), I just wanted to set it up as a subdomain.

  • h33t-l4x0r 6 hours ago

    Works great for me, 5 subdomains coming to various ports on my dev pc for whatever project I'm testing (8000 for laravel, 3000 for nextjs). Way better than ngrok.

  • f311a 4 hours ago

    We spent 3 days trying to properly integrate their tunnels to our internal network. I took us 3 hours to integrate tailscale.

    Tunnels are poorly documented.

  • Jnr 6 hours ago

    It was a smooth experience for me. Just start the cloudflared container with the provided key in the environment and you are done. I also don't have ipv6 but it is not required and if I remember correctly I did not have to specify any endpoints, just the key.

  • stingraycharles 5 hours ago

    We're using Cloudflare Zero Trust quite extensively, and I find them quite easy to use. Works perfectly from AWS as well, all their endpoints have both IPv4 and IPv6 IPs.

  • watermelon0 8 hours ago

    Haven't used Cloudflare in a while, but in the past you needed $200/month Business plan to be able to use subdomains of an existing domain with DNS hosted elsewhere.

    • h33t-l4x0r 2 hours ago

      Nah, I'm free tier. I register domains through them and I think I pay around $10/month for R2 storage. All kinds of other freebies come on that tier, D1 databases (sqlite), Workers (think Lambda)

  • pyeri 5 hours ago

    localtunnel[1] is one good option, at least for now.

    [1] https://localtunnel.github.io/www/

    • letmetweakit 4 hours ago

      I don't really get how the developer can run the project free of charge without monetization options. Does this solely rely on donors?

      • pyeri 3 hours ago

        Tunneling isn't that big of a toll on resource, it doesn't require storage/disk space nor compute power (CPU chips), all it needs is ingress/egress (spare bandwidth). A non-profit or decent business in telco can easily offer it, consider that many hosting companies offer entire package in free tier today (compute + disk + egress).

        For several years, ngrok was practically free, only recently they've started monetizing once it gained popularity.

    • mrasong 4 hours ago

      Gotta say, this is amazing, exactly what I needed.

  • noir_lord an hour ago

    I use it with a separate docker compose project so everything lives inside that (with traefik) and it's been utterly bulletproof for years - took a little puzzling out to start with but otherwise no drama and lets me do foo-whatever.mydomain.co.uk and route publically which is fantastic for local dev stuff or where I want to test something on iphone/android easily or share it - keeps all that stuff out of my "stack" for dev projects which makes for a very fast spinup if I want to test something.

  • csomar 7 hours ago

    That really sums up the cloudflare experience and this is from someone heavily invested in their workers platform. They have lots of products and keep pumping more but except for DNS, most of them are half assed with weak maintenance/support.

    • CuriouslyC 2 hours ago

      That's not a fair take. I will give Cloudflare a lot of shit for some of their products, but some of their products are 100% best in class. For instance, R2 is just better than S3, and KV is better than AWS/GCP options. The pricing is better, it's multi-region by default and there's less ops overhead.

      • csomar 3 minutes ago

        I agree with R2 but KV is un-realiable. I said DNS but I meant CDN which R2 kind of falls into. Cloudflare is good in moving lots of data but most of their other products are not polished. It doesn't mean that they are not exceptional products. I have deployed a wasm-worker 5 years ago and it is still up and running to this day. I don't think a server would have survived or any other product from any other provider would have guaranteed such backward compatibility.

      • Eikon an hour ago

        R2 is very high latency with huge variance, definitely lower quality than S3.

        In my experience even backblaze b2 performs (way) better.

        Their community forums are full of such reports.

        KV is so expensive that it’s barely usable, and like R2, is very slow.

        • theultdev 30 minutes ago

          Slightly higher latency. I've seen about 20-30% increase from S3 to R2. But the bill is magnitudes lower.

          Agree with the KV point, Upstash is the same. But I just use dragonflydb on a single VM. No point paying for transactions.

          Hell, S3 could have 20ms latency and it wouldn't matter since I can't afford it.

pclmulqdq 9 hours ago

Interesting. No mention of kernel bypass, which Cloudflare was also discussing in 2023-2024.

  • wmf 8 hours ago

    Outside of HPC/HFT most people will never need kernel bypass. If you just got off Nginx you probably have years of optimizations left to do. (Username checks out though.)

    • majke 6 hours ago

      There should be a political party for people who use opcode mnemonics as their nicknames or domain names.

nwellinghoff 8 hours ago

So why is this surfacing again now and why not a up to date article on Oxy? Which sounds very useful btw.

  • wmf 8 hours ago

    There are always people who haven't heard about stuff. https://xkcd.com/1053/

    • nchmy 2 hours ago

      Surely you're not saying that everyone should just start posting all of cloudflare's blog posts? Let alone all blog posts on the net.

      So, what's the threshold for what should be shared, given that most people don't know most thing things...?

      • patapong 2 hours ago

        Isn't this the point of upvoting though - if people find it interesting and new, they will upvote and stuff will be visible.

        I also think HN does some sort of deduplication if something has been posted recently (to count as upvote instead of new submission), but not sure of the details.

      • stingraycharles 2 hours ago

        People can submit anything they want. If it’s interesting, it’ll get upvoted. If not, it’ll not reach the front page.

        Isn’t that the whole benefit of sites like HN and Reddit?

jnord 9 hours ago

(2023)

lionkor 5 hours ago

Another un-google-able (OXY as in Occidental Petroleum Corp?) name for a Rust project. We just cannot help ourselves.

  • jalk 3 hours ago

    The article states that it's a proprietary project

koakuma-chan 7 hours ago

How does it compare to Pangora?

  • thayne 6 hours ago

    Is it the same thing? Perhaps oxy was later renamed to pingora?

AbuAssar 8 hours ago

clever name

  • leosanchez 7 hours ago

    What does it mean ?

    • drexlspivey 6 hours ago

      Oxy actually means sharp or acidic in greek. Oxygen was wrongly named like that (acid former) because it was thought to be the element to give acids their sourness but later many acids without oxygen were discovered. The key turned out to be hydrogen not oxygen

    • BoorishBears 7 hours ago

      An informal nickname for the opioid Oxycodone

      • theturtle32 6 hours ago

        Or a reference to oxidation, the process by which rust is formed…

mxxx 8 hours ago

unfortunate name

  • isodev 5 hours ago

    Yup, here I am on the other side of the world and that was the first thing it reminds me of. The link to Rust is... remote, and I have to think a lot :D

  • mattclarkdotnet 7 hours ago

    Only in America

  • leosanchez 7 hours ago

    What does it mean ?

    • stanac 7 hours ago

      Short for oxycodone, a drug abused by addicts.

  • system2 6 hours ago

    They were too nerdy to think that way (or even know the street drug names).

    • isodev 5 hours ago

      I know it because of movies and books... so can we trust a "next generation proxy framework" by people who don't go out, don't read and don't watch culture things? The name is similar in other languages too..

      • wongarsu 3 hours ago

        The implication of being too nerdy would be that they are extremely well-versed in fantasy, science fiction and/or anime as well as random niche topics. They would probably read or watch way more culture things than you or me, just the kind that deals with current societal issues by allegory and thus wouldn't use real-world street names for drugs

        Not that I think that that's a fair conclusion to jump through. Occam's razor would prefer "they were probably vaguely aware and didn't care". Just like how Torvalds knowingly named git after a slang word for a stupid person

      • hiccuphippo an hour ago

        Sure, those things are orthogonal to each other.

blinkingled 3 hours ago

Stopped reading at proprietary. Seriously why would I care tying my app to something proprietary and have no way out of it?

  • stingraycharles an hour ago

    What makes you think you can download it and use it yourself? This is just CloudFlare discussing their internal tech stack.