In a previous post I wrote about using ZeroTier for my homelab and mentioned I ended up writing two scripts:

• one for joining a network and authorizing the new device
• another for creating DNS entries in DNSMASQ for DNS lookup

This first part will focus on how I join my new servers to my ZeroTier labnetwork. For more information about ZeroTier in general go read my other post that go in much more detail about that. Part two about DNS for ZeroTier will soon be available.

Lets get started!

I have started to test out ZeroTier as an alternative to traditional VPN for my home lab. I’m not unhappy about how VPN works with my Ubiquity USG setup, but I need something more intrinsic and independant of whereever my workloads would run and not depend on a connection to homelap or me connecting to it for access to these. In my opinion VPN is great for high performance site-to-site tunnels or for roadworkers out and about needing to connect to the “office/data center” i.e some aggregate of workloads in close proximity. They’re not well suited for scattered ephemeral workloads and I do not want to maintain scripting handeling a cumpersome setup processes for each new VM/contrainer or VPN site-to-site tunnels between my homelab, worklab and a couple of public cloud providers (those guys even charge for VPN connections). For my requirements a simple to setup and encrypted overlay solution is a far better option as I tend to spin up short lived workloads on everything between my own raspberry pi cluster, worklab and clouds like AWS and Google.
There are great VPN alternatives available like WireGuard or Tinc with powerfull features not found elswhere. Though they’re still more comparable to traditional VPN - plus they’re still more complex to setup than ZeroTier.

Anyway, let dig into ZeroTier!