I've seen a few but I can't decide which protocol to use yet. I'm working on a DHT pet project and I'd like to avoid making it rely on any relay servers.

Thanks in advance for any pointers!

I'm building this implementation of a circular DHT from scratch because I want to learn and understand how peer-to-peer protocols work. So far so good, but I'm realizing I don't know two things and I don't know where to find them:

1. What NAT traversal method to use. Do I necessarily need to rely on relay servers for UDP hole punching or STUN?
2. What is the most reasonable way to test the overall system is working? Should I build a docker network with each node being a container or are there specialized tools for testing networked applications?

Thanks in advance for any answers or pointers!

I'm following this course with its book and it's really nice.

I'm not sure if I'd use pfsense but some of the advice here is quite useful.