ZeroTier - A Planetary Ethernet Switch

ZeroTier is a software-based managed Ethernet switch for planet Earth.

It erases the LAN/WAN distinction and makes VPNs, tunnels, proxies, and other kludges arising from the inflexible nature of physical networks obsolete. Everything is encrypted end-to-end and traffic takes the most direct (peer to peer) path available.

This repository contains ZeroTier One, a service that provides ZeroTier network connectivity to devices running Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and FreeBSD and makes joining virtual networks as easy as joining IRC or Slack channels. It also contains the OS-independent core ZeroTier protocol implementation in node/.

Visit ZeroTier's site for more information and pre-built binary packages. Apps for Android and iOS are available for free in the Google Play and Apple app stores.

Getting Started

ZeroTier's basic operation is easy to understand. Devices have 10-digit ZeroTier addresses like 89e92ceee5 and networks have 16-digit network IDs like 8056c2e21c000001. All it takes for a device to join a network is its 16-digit ID, and all it takes for a network to authorize a device is its 10-digit address. Everything else is automatic.

A "device" can be anything really: desktops, laptops, phones, servers, VMs/VPSes, containers, and even (soon) apps.

For testing we provide a public virtual network called Earth with network ID 8056c2e21c000001. On Linux and Mac you can do this with:

sudo zerotier-cli join 8056c2e21c000001

Now wait about 30 seconds and check your system with ip addr list or ifconfig. You'll see a new interface whose name starts with zt and it should quickly get an IPv4 and an IPv6 address. Once you see it get an IP, try pinging earth.zerotier.net at 29.209.112.93. If you've joined Earth from more than one system, try pinging your other machine.

(IPv4 addresses for Earth are assigned from the block 28.0.0.0/7, which is not a part of the public Internet but is non-standard for private networks. It's used to avoid IP conflicts during testing. Your networks can run any IP addressing scheme you want.)

If you don't want to belong to a giant Ethernet party line anymore, just type:

sudo zerotier-cli leave 8056c2e21c000001

The zt interface will disappear. You're no longer on the network.

To create networks of your own you'll need a network controller. You can use our hosted controller at my.zerotier.com which is free for up to 100 devices on an unlimited number of networks, or you can build your own controller and run it through its local JSON API. See README.md in controller/ for more information.

Building from Source

For Mac, Linux, and BSD, just type make (or gmake on BSD). Platform requirements are:

• Mac: Xcode command line tools for OSX 10.7 or newer.
• Linux: GCC/G++ 4.9 or newer or CLANG 3.4 or newer, and GNU make and standard shell tools of course.
  • The Linux make file will auto-detect and prefer CLANG if present since in our experience it does a better job optimizing C++ code. You can specify CC= and CXX= on the make command line to override this behavior.
  • Several distributions including CentOS 7 ship with G++ 4.8 which has broken C++11 support. If you are running CentOS 7 type sudo yum install clang to install CLANG 3.4, which will work fine. There is no C++11 in the ZeroTier core but we have started using it in the service and network controller code.
  • If any of the following have development headers on the system they are auto-detected and the build will link against system versions: http-parser, lz4, libnatpmp, and miniupnpc. If these are missing (or too old) the versions in ext/ are used and are statically linked into the binary. Please be aware of this since if you build with these present the resulting binary will require them on other systems too.
• FreeBSD: GCC/G++ 4.9 or newer and gmake since our make files use GNU extensions.

Each supported platform has its own make-XXX.mk file that contains the actual make rules for the platform. The right .mk file is included by the main Makefile based on the GNU make OSTYPE variable. Take a look at the .mk file for your platform for other targets, debug build rules, etc.

Typing make selftest will build a zerotier-selftest binary which unit tests various internals and reports on a few aspects of the build environment. It's a good idea to try this on novel platforms or architectures.

Windows, of course, is special. A Visual Studio solution file is located in the windows/ subfolder. We have not tried MinGW or CLANG for Windows but these may work, though you will have issues building the Windows GUI with them.

Mac and Windows require tun/tap virtual network port drivers. We include pre-built signed binaries for these in ext/bin, so you should not need to build these yourself. Linux, FreeBSD, and others can use built-in kernel support for tun/tap network devices.

Running

Running zerotier-one with -h will show help.

On Linux and BSD you can start the service with:

sudo ./zerotier-one -d

A home folder for your system will automatically be created.

The service is controlled via the JSON API, which by default is available at 127.0.0.1 port 9993. We include a zerotier-cli command line utility to make API calls for standard things like joining and leaving networks. The authtoken.secret file in the home folder contains the secret token for accessing this API. See README.md in service/ for API documentation.

Here's where home folders live (by default) on each OS:

• Linux: /var/lib/zerotier-one
• FreeBSD: /var/db/zerotier-one
• Mac: /Library/Application Support/ZeroTier/One
• Windows: \ProgramData\ZeroTier\One (That's for Windows 7. The base 'shared app data' folder might be different on different Windows versions.)

Running ZeroTier One on a Mac is the same, but OSX requires a kernel extension. We ship a signed binary build of the ZeroTier tap device driver, which can be installed on Mac with:

sudo make install-mac-tap

This will create the home folder for Mac, place tap.kext there, and set its modes correctly to enable ZeroTier One to manage it with kextload and kextunload.

Troubleshooting

For most users, it just works.

If you are running a local system firewall, we recommend adding a rule permitting UDP port 9993 inbound and outbound. If you installed binaries for Windows this should be done automatically. Other platforms might require manual editing of local firewall rules depending on your configuration.

The Mac firewall can be found under "Security" in System Preferences. Linux has a variety of firewall configuration systems and tools. If you're using Ubuntu's ufw, you can do this:

sudo ufw allow 9993/udp

On CentOS check /etc/sysconfig/iptables for IPTables rules. For other distributions consult your distribution's documentation. You'll also have to check the UIs or documentation for commercial third party firewall applications like Little Snitch (Mac), McAfee Firewall Enterprise (Windows), etc. if you are running any of those. Some corporate environments might have centrally managed firewall software, so you might also have to contact IT.

ZeroTier One peers will automatically locate each other and communicate directly over a local wired LAN if UDP port 9993 inbound is open. If that port is filtered, they won't be able to see each others' LAN announcement packets. If you're experiencing poor performance between devices on the same physical network, check their firewall settings. Without LAN auto-location peers must attempt "loopback" NAT traversal, which sometimes fails and in any case requires that every packet traverse your external router twice.

Users behind certain types of firewalls and "symmetric" NAT devices may not able able to connect to external peers directly at all. ZeroTier has limited support for port prediction and will attempt to traverse symmetric NATs, but this doesn't always work. If P2P connectivity fails you'll be bouncing UDP packets off our relay servers resulting in slower performance. Some NAT router(s) have a configurable NAT mode, and setting this to "full cone" will eliminate this problem. If you do this you may also see a magical improvement for things like VoIP phones, Skype, BitTorrent, WebRTC, certain games, etc., since all of these use NAT traversal techniques similar to ours.

If you're interested, there's a technical deep dive about NAT traversal on our blog. A troubleshooting tool to help you diagnose NAT issues is planned for the future as are uPnP/IGD/NAT-PMP and IPv6 transport.

If a firewall between you and the Internet blocks ZeroTier's UDP traffic, you will fall back to last-resort TCP tunneling to rootservers over port 443 (https impersonation). This will work almost anywhere but is very slow compared to UDP or direct peer to peer connectivity.

Contributing

Please make pull requests against the dev branch. The master branch is release, and edge is for unstable and work in progress changes and is not likely to work.

License

The ZeroTier source code is open source and is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 (not LGPL). If you'd like to embed it in a closed-source commercial product or appliance, please e-mail contact@zerotier.com to discuss commercial licensing. Otherwise it can be used for free.