Edit: How many machines would you expect to run it on? What would be your expectations for the licence use on multiple machines?

Rouler is "rules for your routes". It allows you to steer network traffic across multiple network interfaces on Windows. For example:

- Run Tailscale, Mullvad and OpenVPN official clients simultaneously.

- Use Rouler to send Slack via the OpenVPN connection, Chrome + an IP range via Tailscale and a torrent client via Mullvad.

Rouler is VPN agnostic, so you can "split-tunnel" with anything that sets up a windows network interface.

I'm an independent developer from Australia and have been working on Rouler for a bit over a year. It's been a challenging project to say the least, but I'm really happy with how it's turning out. I have spent a great deal of time building and throwing things away, starting over, belting the initial poc into something that I find intuitive... hopefully others do too!

I've done all the testing, fixing and improving I can, so now it's open for public beta. I'd love to hear your feedback... and there are some specific points I'm interested in hearing about listed on the Rouler website. Please reply with any questions you might have.

Thanks for reading!

Brendan

p.s. Rouler is "built in Rust" TM ;-)

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On AI (skip if you're sick of hearing about it):

Since AI is the hot topic and people are naturally cautious about it, I'll add some quick notes about it, specifically about the driver development as that's the key thing to get right. The driver is hand written and every detail has been poured over many times over. I spent somewhere around 6-9 months manually building and testing just the driver, staring at Dbgview logs, wireshark logs, windows route tables, restarting VM's back to their snapshot and manually copying things across to start again. That's not always the most efficient way of doing things, but it's the way it had to be done. If I had tried to vibe code it Rouler simply wouldn't exist. I did try to lean on AI at times, but it constantly sent me in the wrong direction, told me things weren't possible, tried to take shortcuts and implement poor performing trade-offs. It also loved to hallucinate the windows api. Keep in mind this was around the Opus 4.1 - 4.6 days.

Outside of the driver, in user mode land, AI has crept more and more into my workflow. I've had a lot of success utilising the latest models in the app in particular, and I purposefully separated the UI and core logic so I'm able to quickly iterate on the UI. I've also found AI very useful for scripting and refactoring. It has built some great scripts that would've taken me days or weeks to build and fine tune.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50161144

Points: 26

# Comments: 7

You're free to run WireSock in the terminal. It's linked to in this post and in the github repo. TunnlTo aims to make WireSock more accessible and to add some quality of life features. I'm collaborating with the WireSock creator and while it may seem simple at the moment it is early days... we had to start somewhere.

> I would actually say it's pretty dangerous to have something installing .msi from git, touching registry etc ...

Did you look at this code?: https://github.com/TunnlTo/desktop-app/blob/main/dist/setup....

It tells the user why it needs to install the msi, explains what it is, and gives them the option to proceed. The msi is signed by the same EV code signing certificate as the TunnlTo app. There is also information about WireSock and links in the GitHub readme.

> installing .msi from git

The .msi doesn't come from "git", it is included in the TunnlTo installer which is standard practice.

> touching registry etc ...

I'm not sure why there would be a concern if a msi interacts with the registry? That is pretty standard stuff.

Well it's not finished yet :)

The reasons for choosing Tauri:

- With new projects I try to learn something new but not everything all at once. This helps to not get overwhelmed and ship something in a reasonable timeframe.

- I'm comfortable with HTML, CS, JS and I wanted to learn Rust which Tauri uses.

- I figured the UI is going to change a lot in the early days and I wanted to be able to iterate on it quickly, so choosing something I know already for the UI made sense to me.

- If the project gets bigger, I can move to a JS framework easily enough and will have access to all the ecosystem it provides.

- I thought it would be easier to attract contributors with a web framework UI and Rust.

- While I want it to be as lightweight as possible, it is not going to be run on low spec machines so I feel like the tech stack is fit for purpose.

That is a cool trick. Can you actually define which Firefox tabs use the proxy? Does it highlight the tab in some way to show you which connection you're on?

I agree, it needs better visibility of what is happening with the active connection. Its easy enough to use icanhazip etc. in a browser to see the active IP but that's not possible in apps like a torrent downloader or game. Someone suggested a feature to monitor data input/output in the repo discussion area so I'll tag onto that with your suggestions.

TunnlTo uses WireSock https://www.wiresock.net/ which is a custom network driver built by Vadim Smirnov. He'll be on later to answer any technical questions. He is the expert in networking and kernel level drivers.

I wouldn't call it bullet-proof enough for a killswitch yet but certainly is something we're working towards. The response so far from HN is encouraging so it looks like it will be worthwhile dedicating more time to the project to get it to that level.