Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

Spiped is excellent, I use it in production for really critical stuff and it's rock solid. Seriously one of the best pieces of software ever written. I've never even once had to debug a problem with it, it just works.

joshbaptiste · 2h ago

I no longer have SSH listening on the bare internet on my VPS nodes .. I either place spiped in front of the standard daemon or disable it entirely and utilize Tailscale SSH

cylinder714 · 2h ago

I posted this in response to the news that Kazakhstan is blocking Wireguard connections entirely:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45054598

cylinder714 · 44m ago

Uzbekistan!

maples37 · 7h ago

> This is similar to 'ssh -L' functionality, but does not use SSH and requires a pre-shared symmetric key.

I already have SSH set up and functional, what advantage does spiped offer?

unsnap_biceps · 5h ago

I'm presuming this is pretty similar to https://www.stunnel.org

We would use stunnel rather than SSH for non-interactive usages. Having an active stunnel running all the time is safer than requiring a full SSH session being active.

tptacek · 3h ago

stunnel predates spiped by quite some time; spiped is a reaction to stunnel --- specifically, a network hole punch for people who trust neither OpenSSL nor OpenSSH's attack surface.

Today, most people would just use WireGuard for this.

0xCMP · 7h ago

iirc spiped uses TLS/OpenSSL for securing the connection, the symmetric key avoids the key-exchange and worrying about certificates, and therefore is better capable of efficiently using the connection than SSH by itself.

Because it's much simpler it's also a good way to expose a system to the internet, although Wireguard with a PSK is a very similar and possibly superior solution.

tptacek · 3h ago

spiped does not in fact use TLS.

A subthread from 2014:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7540288

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Spiped – secure pipe for SSH, SMTP, etc.

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