Project Wisp

This is an experimental project for creating P2P connections through the browser as much as possible, with minimal aid of a server. The goal is to setup voronoi-like p2p connections that can create a low-cost global network mesh.

TURNs out it is harder than I thought. WebRTC has been around for more than 5 years now and it only budged a little on the sliding scale of accessibility vs gate-keeped.

Expectations

• 1 frontend code with WebRTC
• 1 minimal discovery and signalling server
• 1 free STUN server provided by Google at stun:stun.l.google.com:19302

Reality

• 1 frontend code with PeerJS as a wrapper library to the mess that is the WebRTC API
• 1 signalling server (from PeerServer) -- which tbf, we could bake in the discovery server -- but it's oh so f-hard 🤣
• 1 discovery server (my business logic) that dictates which peer can discover which peer
• 1 free STUN server provided by Google ✔
• 1 coTURN server because outside of your own LAN, STUN and direct P2P from WebRTC will fail. I didn't even have the patience to set this up correctly. We have the option to rent TURN servers from Twilio or Xirsys, but that's an investment I don't want to take.

Status: Fail. I'm going back to the traditional server-client architecture ☀

Status (the next morning): OK. I'm jumping in the TURN train. Xirsys has a free tier. Choo choo!

Development

You need to docker-compose.

$ docker-compose up

The backend listens at localhost:3000 and localhost:3002. The coTURN server listens at localhost:3478. The frontend listens at localhost:5000 and localhost:35729 (for ws).

Blockers

• PH to PH connections work on STUN and (my) TURN setup. I set up a SOCKS tunnel so that I could simulate SH to PH p2p connection and it failed miserably. Only SG to SG or PH to PH p2p connections work. Bummer.
• In other news, turns out you could have a semi-VPN by using a SOCKS tunnel! Pretty easy to setup in Firefox too.

Promising Techs

• https://github.com/manubb/Leaflet.PixiOverlay
• Web Workers
• Indexed DB