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Erebus, A VPN client that runs rootless in user space

Details

External ID
48386183
Source
HN
Company
—
Product
Erebus, A VPN client that runs rootless in user space
Website domain
margaine.com
Launched
June 3, 2026
Cohort
—
Upvotes
60
Upvotes percentile
0.8647540983606558
Tags
—
Fetched at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Updated at
Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Enrichment

Theme
systems tools and desktop utilities
Vertical
Security
Function
Hardware & robotics
Audience
B2C
AI stance
Not AI
Project type
Commercial product
Normalized one-liner
vpn client that runs rootless in user space
Manually corrected
False

Could you build this?

Partial Building a cross-platform user-space VPN client without root privileges requires handling virtual networking stacks (like gVisor netstack or lwIP) and local SOCKS5/HTTP proxy hooks.

What it would actually take: The architecture relies on a user-space TCP/IP stack (such as gVisor's netstack in Go or smoltcp in Rust) converting raw IP packets into stream traffic without creating kernel TUN/TAP interfaces. It routes traffic through protocol tunnels (e.g., WireGuard or Shadowsocks) entirely via unprivileged sockets. While an LLM can generate standard proxy boilerplate, debugging edge cases in user-space network translation and DNS interception requires solid networking systems knowledge.

Discussion

No comments on this launch.

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one — 1039 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #140 of 1040 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 215 days after the earliest competitor.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a hardware & robotics tool for Horizontal yet.