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  • Just yesterday I was complaining that I wanted to SSH back to my homenet while at the office, on my office (not home) tailnet. I wrote something based on Iroh to do this, but it's one shot (ie not particularly generalized). Might be able to throw it away or redesign it with some inspiration from this! Thanks.
    by aseipp
  • I've spent time finally learning what tailscale is and how it works and I'm impressed. It's a rare thing in the technology world but I'm glad I finally took the time.

    I literally just figured out how tsnet fits into the picture (an in-process Go based entire network stack that gets the process to act as a node in the tailnet) and so that helps me understand this (everything in tsnet excepting the control plane). It's very impressive that they can do this in a reliable way.

    by stillpointlab
  • Peers might not want to use third party rendezvous servers or relay servers

    It appears that Tailscale attempts to persuade peers not to run own "DERP" servers (cf. encouraging peers to run own servers)

    "In general, you should not need to or want to run this code. The overwhelming majority of Tailscale users (both individuals and companies) do not."

    "Running your own DERP services requires exeprtise [sic] in multi-layer network and application diagnostics. As the DERP runs multiple protocols at multiple layers and is not a regular HTTP(s) server you will need expertise in correlative analysis to diagnose the most tricky problems. There is no "plain text" or "open" mode of operation for DERP."

    https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/tree/main/cmd/derper

    Unclear why the company markets peer-to-peer networking but wants traffic going to their own third party servers

    In contrast, Nebula, another Go peer-to-peer project encourages peers to run their own rendezvous server ("lighthouse")

    https://github.com/slackhq/nebula

    "To set up a Nebula network, you'll need:

    2. (Optional, but you really should..) At least one discovery node with a routable IP address, which we call a lighthouse."

    The comparison to nc seems off. Original netcat has no required third party dependencies, no recommended third party dependencies, and not enough complexity to be linked to a company selling associated SaaS or consulting

    by 1vuio0pswjnm7
  • This is so cool! I mean, we really wouldn't need it if we had 100% ipv6 (no cgnat), but this is the next best thing. I think people underestimate the innovation that could happen if we had trivial p2p.
    by pbohun
  • It looks like a direct competitor for the recently launched bitbang-cli

    https://github.com/richlegrand/bitbang-cli

    by archietect
  • I enjoy that they supply a nix install/environment, similar to the main tailscale/tailscale repo. Is nix widespread or the standard dev environment at tailscale, or is it like a 10% option and most people just use Docker or whatever?
    by mikepurvis
  • So this is somewhat similar to Iroh?

    https://github.com/n0-computer/iroh

    by megamorf
  • One fun use case: a coworker just whipped up this Minecraft mod using tailcat as its transport: https://github.com/tailscale/tailcat-for-minecraft

    (just a cute demo, not intended for release or ongoing maintenance)

    by bradfitz

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