Gateway Co-op

Why do we need a gateway server?

on connection in the age of corporate software

If you wanted to create a network connection from your computer to mine (that is, a digital pathway over which we could transfer some data to one another), how would you go about doing it? The path of least resistance would likely be to use the services of a software company, which could route data from your computer to mine via their centralized servers, opening up an array of possible methods for exploitation. The gateway server and this co-op are a refusal to accept this norm, imagining new possibilities for "connection" on the internet.

What is a gateway server?

A gateway server is a server that acts as a sort of bridge between clients and another server(s). There are many reasons one would want to do this; the intermediary gateway can be used to hide details about the server it directs to, or to impose additional authentication measures on the client. Oftentimes, gateways are used as an entryway to a company's VPN or as traffic filters. However, this gateway does not lead to a corporate private network ... rather it is a portal to many different servers, most of them self-hosted.

Self-hosting a server requires some basic infrastructure -- hardware, an internet connection, a static IP address, and access to this IP address via the public internet. It is this last requirement that often poses a challenge for self-hosters. There are many technical details involved in this, and this article from tailscale provides more of a deep-dive, but the key take away here is that for a device connected to the internet from a private network (e.g. local WiFi), making requests to the public internet is easy, but receiving requests on that device from the public internet is difficult.

(on client-server thinking)

The need for a gateway server as a solution for self-hosting flips traditional notions of the client-server paradigm on its head. "Servers" are typically thought to be owned by companies that have many resources at their disposal, not people running machines on their home network. In this sense, the gateway server re-imagines the types of connections that the internet could be host to, with a little more infrastructure. What servers would people make if hosting from your home was just as easy as connecting to a WiFi network?

How does the gateway server work?

The gateway server uses tunneling to connect clients to servers that have connected to the gateway. This has the dual advantage of allowing people to expose their server to the public internet from their home network, while hiding the IP address and location of their home server from the public.

More on Tunneling

Network tunneling creates a secure, private pathway for your data within your network to travel through the internet. Just like putting a letter inside another envelope with a different address, tunneling wraps your internet traffic in a protective layer that hides where it's really going. Accessing a VPN is a form of network tunneling.

Gateways

A network gateway sits between two different types of networks (like your home Wi-Fi and the internet) and translates the "language" so they can communicate with each other. A gateway decides what data can pass between networks, can block suspicious traffic, and directs information to the right destination within your network. The box that provides your Wi-Fi is actually a gateway that connects all your devices (phones, laptops, smart TVs) to the internet!

Tailscale

Tailscale is a popular overlay network-virtual network that is built on top of an existing physical network. In the background, a virtual network uses tunnels to connect the different computers. On a network level, a tunnel appears exactly like an ethernet cable — so to your operating system a virtual network appears the same as though you had connected all of these computers in different places with giant ethernet cables.

An Invitation

<3, Arushi & Meag