Working with EasyTier: its wire protocol, its mesh model, and what it takes to be a well-behaved node on it.
3 posts
A mesh VPN comparison for 2026 — Tailscale vs ZeroTier, plus NetBird, Nebula and EasyTier — judged on control plane, data plane, L2 vs L3, NAT traversal, self-hosting and lock-in. No stale pricing tables, just the tradeoffs that decide a self-hosted VPN.
I replaced a hub-and-spoke WireGuard setup with an EasyTier mesh VPN: one overlay network name and secret, peers that punch through NAT for direct P2P paths, and a relay only when they can't. A concrete homelab walk-through — install, form the private mesh, verify routes, and expose a service.
ESPTier reimplements the EasyTier v2.6.4 wire protocol in plain C on an ESP32-C3 — TCP framing, SipHash-1-3 identity, AES-128-GCM, route sync and forwarding — so a constrained MCU becomes a real, pingable member of an overlay network.