Usage question

[lonnietc]

Hello,

I am looking at various Golang project for a massively scaling P2P project. For this work, I have been looking at:

Pinecone
Yggdrasil
Go-Libp2p

and others if I can find them, but so far these "seem" to be the best for what I need.

I am wondering if Pinecone can be compiled in as a library for the core application that I am making of which part of it will have a DHT for some KV data passing for consistency.

Can Pinecone be compiled in as a library?

[lonnietc]

forgot to mention that I also came across the "Noise" library

https://github.com/perlin-network/noise

which is supposed to be extremely good as well.

[lonnietc]

Hello,

What is the simplest way to test out 3 pinecone P2P nodes in a small test cluster?

[neilalexander]

Can Pinecone be compiled in as a library?

It can be used as a regular net.PacketConn interface in Go applications, yes. I don't suppose it will be too easy to use it in a non-Go application though.

What is the simplest way to test out 3 pinecone P2P nodes in a small test cluster?

What exactly do you want to test?

[lonnietc]

Hello and sorry for the late reply.

I am just interested in setting up 3 or more instances (on Windows, for example) to see it in action in a small private cluster. I am assuming that each instance would need to be run on different physical computers.

Also, the application that I am developing is written in Go and is namely targeted toward a desktop P2P database which could have a huge number of nodes unlike other distributed database approaches which have a smaller number of dedicated database servers in a cluster. My project would be a P2P database system where nodes might join an leave often.

Could you please show me some examples of starting up some nodes into the same mesh cluster?

[lonnietc]

Is there any update on this?

I just want to start up 3 - 5 nodes and may ping through them to see the latency.

I actually have a few Linux servers online and some Windows boxes that I will use for the testing.

Can you please list some basic startup commands that I can use on the CLI for this?

I have actually narrowed my project (a game clustering network) down to either trying to use Pinecone or Yggdrasil.

Based upon your site, I would like to be an early adopter of Pinecone since it seems to be a bit more advanced than Yggdrasil but Yggdrasil has a bit more documentation that I can follow to start up and test things out.

Any help that you could provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Thanks.

[lonnietc]

Hello Neil,

Hope that all is well.

I have been able to easily start up pinecone on a couple of machines for testing with:

-- Sys 1 --
pinecone -listen 192.168.0.23

-- Sys 2 --
pinecone -listen 192.168.0.24:9999 -connect 129.168.0.23

What I am wondering now is how to send data across the mesh network from another application since I do not think that pinecone itself uses TUN network devices so that there is no virtual ethernet connection but could be wrong on this.

Please let me know.
Thanks

[neilalexander]

Sorry I haven't responded to this sooner, buried under notifications.

The ./cmd/pinecone binary is a headless router that is just used for providing routing to other nodes.

There's a separate ./cmd/pineconeip binary that uses TUN to send things over the network, but it's not very reliable, probably only works on Linux and it also doesn't have any encryption (your packets will be sent in the clear). It's really intended for use in the meshnet-lab, not for general purpose use.

For experimentation it might do what you want, but Pinecone is not really meant to be used in this way — it's designed to be a plug-in module for other applications.

[neilalexander]

FYI — for using Pinecone as a net.PacketConn in a Go application: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/matrix-org/pinecone@v0.0.0-20221026160848-639feeff74d6/router

[lonnietc]

Thanks for getting back to me on these questions.

So, then it seems that in order to be of any use, I would need to run Pinecone and then PineconeIP. By the way, I did send over a link to what seems like a very simple and useful TUN library that supports multiple platforms to include Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

For my project, I am building a type of online 3D game system which could have thousands of P2P nodes and wanted to use Pinecone to be able to establish Mesh connections for all of the nodes (clients) and was not greatly concerned about needing them to be on a VPN or dedicated TUN devices but mostly to ensure P2P mesh connections to each other.

What would you suggest as I really liked the approach in the documentation of Pinecone over Yggdrasil which is not bad as well, but Pinecone seemed better if I can determine that it could do the job?

As a mesh router, I am wondering if just maybe that would be useful in itself, just a thought.
Thanks again

[neilalexander]

./cmd/pineconeip contains the same router code that ./cmd/pinecone does, so you don't need to run both.

If you are doing this as a part of an application though then I wouldn't think that TUN is really what you want:

1. TUN will expose the system to another network, which might not be what users expect;
2. TUN usually requires admin permissions to set up and configure;
3. You can't really stop anything else from using the TUN interface either.

I would think you want to embed it into your application and use it like a net.PacketConn-style "socket" instead.

[lonnietc]

I see what you mean now and perhaps embedding pinecone is what I need to do so that the nodes can send traffic to each other via the pinecone mesh network.

Also, the pinecone application in the github repo is just to test connections, I guess and would not be useful unless embedded in the server code.

I was just trying to get a feel for what the actual pinecone.exe application that I compiled is used for in its current state since it did not seem to be able to send other messages to the other nodes except for what was hardcoded for heartbeat messages within the mesh. I had figured that the pineconeip.exe used a TUN device but was going to try to stay away from using that if at all possible since to stat up most things that use TUN devices also required the user to elevate their privileges to start up and I did not want them to have to do that when they start their local pinecone node which will be a local server that they connect to when they want to be online in the game. Beyond that, the local node will just run in the background as a P2P node for the mesh network when the user is not connected. That is the idea, at least.

On a side question what is the "pinecone -manhole" switch do?

[neilalexander]

Also, the pinecone application in the github repo is just to test connections, I guess and would not be useful unless embedded in the server code.

Well, we use ./cmd/pinecone to run the public peers at wss://pinecone.matrix.org/public, since ultimately they just need to carry traffic for other nodes.

On a side question what is the "pinecone -manhole" switch do?

The manhole is just a HTTP endpoint that prints out the internal router state for debugging, so you can see information about directly connected peers, paths, DHT entries, queue statistics etc.

[lonnietc]

Hello,

I was working on trying to get PineconeIP integrated with TUN so that it might be used for a massive P2P project in which there could be tens of thousands of users but then I remembered your previous comment:

There's a separate ./cmd/pineconeip binary that uses TUN to send things over the network, but it's not very reliable, probably only works on Linux and it also doesn't have any encryption (your packets will be sent in the clear). It's really intended for use in the meshnet-lab, not for general purpose use.

With this in mind, I was wondering if you had any suggestions for either some other P2P project that you are working on, or perhaps another P2P development that I might investigate?

If "pineconeip" is effectively out of the running, then it seems that I may have to fall back on Yggdrasil or Go-Libp2p since I really do not know of any other possibilities that might be stable and mature enough to handle any really huge scaling needs.

Of course, there is also the SoftEther VPN or other client-server approach that will probably not work for what I need either.

Any thoughts?

[lonnietc]

Just an update.

I think that I have found a reasonable solution for the P2P question.

Although, I do not think that it employs a mesh design, I have come across NEBULA which is put out by Slack development and is said to scale to over 50,000+ nodes easily. If that is true, or not, that will remain to be seen.

https://github.com/slackhq/nebula

In any case, it seems that this will be a good starting point although I had high hopes and a great interest in Pinecone and PineconeIP, in particular, in that I liked the ideas that have gone into it.

I will keep an eye out to see if development continues but I need a solution that I can try to integrate into an evolving project so maybe in the future PineconeIP will be more stable and ready for production use and I will try it again.

Thanks for all of your help and guidance and have a great day.