[tptacek]

I once actually needed to emulate a LAN to do a migration of an ISP POP from one place to another (the terminal servers lived on a LAN with hardcoded dependencies on RADIUS servers, DNS, &c). I did it with a proxy ARP daemon I wrote for the task.

Nothing comes immediately to my mind for why I'd want that same capability in 2014. Which is not to say there isn't an important use case. Rather: even people who have done stuff like this before probably need to be told how this service makes their life better.

[api]

One thing I'm getting from this particular thread is that I need to focus more on use cases and concretes and less on technology, at least in my initial splash page. For some reason these two responses kind of crystalized that for me... I went to the site and viewed it with new eyes and thought "this would only be appealing to a very narrow, technically focused sort of user."

Here's what some current users are doing:

* "Office LAN with no office" for file, printer, and other devices sharing and collaborative development. One comment was "cool, now we can use git as an actual peer to peer version control system."

* Allowing a distributed team to access a license server that must be online to use some commercial app.

* With bridging to extend an office into VPN-space (regular VPN replacement).

* A few users have used it to create a private backplane network between servers in the cloud. I wrote up a blog post on this:

https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=176

* One user is researching it as a way to link together small embedded devices with cellular connections in the field. I've been working with them on this. It builds and runs fine on Raspberry Pi and works over cellular Internet.

* It's got a bit of a following as a way to tunnel out from behind the Chinese Great Firewall, though I'm not sure if that's a sustainable or monetizable area. But I do have one paying customer from this market. It's a commercial user with an office inside China and an office outside that finds it very convenient to have a single LAN spanning their China and Oregon offices.

* The public network feature has a bit of a following in the decentralized networking community. This is not likely to be a direct revenue source but has resulted in a lot of high quality technical feedback.

[abhinavgujjar]

Yep- exactly. NOW I think this might be a simple way for me to access my devices at home securely.

[api]

Updated the web site to be more use case focused:

https://www.zerotier.com/

[paulfurley]

I find it really useful as a (nearly) zero-config way of accessing devices behind a NAT box.

Even my work internet connection is behind a carrier-grade-NAT box so I can't even port forward. I use it to access our Jenkins server which is physically located inside the building.

It's particularly useful for 2 reasons:

- each machine gets a very stable IP (unlike DHCP-assigned addresses) which simplifies hosts files / dnsmasq etc - it's better than port forwarding as every device can work on port 80

So my use case would be something like "simple LAN setup with no more port forwarding"