Nova frees you from relying on your distro’s networking capabilities and from juggling with their complex tools. It provides its own rich networking subsystem, with support for bridging, VLANs and both layer-2 and layer-3 tunnels. While the platform still supports older technologies like OpenVPN, it also provides both Wireguard and Tailscale integration. The latter gives you secure remote access with a few clicks, removing the need for remote access devices and subscriptions. Wi-Fi and cellular interfaces are supported where the hardware provides them.
Nova’s networking system is focused on security, integrity and performance. Routing between interfaces is strictly controlled, with only the traffic that you specifically allow being able to cross network boundaries, while port forwarding and NAT with masquerade allow specific ports to be exposed to restricted lists of external clients. Interfaces can be firewalled, limiting the traffic that they will admit, or MAC filtered to ensure that only known devices are able to connect. Link integrity can be monitored constantly, with fallback interfaces or routes adopted in case of failure. And complex policy-based routing and traffic shaping allows you to control which traffic goes to which interface, and how much bandwidth is allocated to each data stream.