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Tailscale has reached general availability

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Re: Tailscale has reached general availability

#61

Post by apenwarr »

zackmorris wrote: post #58
dfcarney wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Co-founder of Tailscale here) To that end, we started publishing a "blueprint" for people who want to DIY. There's more to explain (and questions encouraged). Please check it out: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/

Thanks for this. From the link: My teammate Dave Anderson is writing a post about all the insanity that is NAT traversal. That alone will probably be as long as this entire article. Stay tuned! I've watched countless p2p projects fail due to NAT difficulties, and spent months/years banging my head against it only to fail too. I've heard that NAT is tragically still a thing with IPv6 as well. Please, if you all make i…

(Tailscale co-founder) I'm with you on this! The NAT problem drives me nuts. That's one of the core concepts behind tailscale. Unfortunately I don't think the "open source NAT traversal as a library" idea will work; it's been tried before, but NAT is just so fiddly that the library invariably "doesn't quite work" in some weird condition and the app developer is left trying to debug NATs, which they don't know how to do.

With Tailscale we want to take full responsibility for connectivity, so that app developers can work on apps that just assume the connectivity+security is there, and users can complain to us instead of them when their computers won't connect. At least, that's the dream. How best to package that up, I'm not quite sure.

Regarding DERP, the server code is open source: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/tree/master/cmd/derpe... and if you look closely, you can see that DERP servers are fully anonymous (pseudonymous?) and will route traffic between any two DERP connections based on their public keys. We rate limit traffic to keep costs under control, and we'll let paying customers boost their speeds, but we intend to always let our DERP network be usable at "reasonable throughput" for free. And since the code is open source, you can write your own tools that do it.

Lots of things to work on. Hope this helps!

Re: Tailscale has reached general availability

#62

Post by dave_universetf »

zackmorris wrote: post #58
dfcarney wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Co-founder of Tailscale here) To that end, we started publishing a "blueprint" for people who want to DIY. There's more to explain (and questions encouraged). Please check it out: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works/

Thanks for this. From the link: My teammate Dave Anderson is writing a post about all the insanity that is NAT traversal. That alone will probably be as long as this entire article. Stay tuned! I've watched countless p2p projects fail due to NAT difficulties, and spent months/years banging my head against it only to fail too. I've heard that NAT is tragically still a thing with IPv6 as well. Please, if you all make i…

IPv6 by and large solves the NAT problem per se, but doesn't solve the stateful firewall traversal problem. Fortunately that one is _much_ simpler, especially now that we have QUIC as a robust stream protocol over UDP. IPv6 also introduces complexity while IPv4 is still around, because you have to detect and handle NAT64 in order to get a v6-only node (with NAT64) and a v4-only node talking to each other.

Completely solving NAT... I've tried a couple of times over the last 10 years, bunch of false starts. You can see one of the older attempts at https://github.com/danderson/nat (don't use it, it's very basic and fails at a lot of NATs). One of the tricky parts is that to make it work right, you really need control of the wire protocol you're using, because you have to inject frames and do all kinds of weird things to help with the NAT part, while ignoring all that noise at the "upper protocol" layer. You can make it generic with some careful layering, but it turns a simple API into a complicated one.

You absolutely need a coordination server for NAT traversal to work. That's unfortunately one of the great unsolved problems for fully decentralized p2p. But it can be _any_ low-bandwidth channel you have available (one of my first implementations piggybacked over XMPP messages), and it doesn't have to be a trusted part of the system (although making it trusted simplifies a ton of stuff). And you also need some kind of data plane relay (like DERP) for when NAT traversal fails, which still happens a fair bit. Without that extra layer of relaying, you'll only ever hit 95-99% connectivity, not 100%.

I'm (slowly) writing an article on NAT traversal that covers all this. It's a thorny problem, and I'd love to solve it once and for all (which is sort-of why I work at Tailscale - I think I have a shot of solving it once and for all at the IP layer, so that all the other layers can just stop caring)

Re: Tailscale has reached general availability

#63

Post by dfcarney »

api wrote: post #52
armaxt wrote: post #10

I will get banned for this in a matter of minutes but I will say the truth to whoever think HN is fair. For the past 3 months, every, again EVERY post that was linked to Tailscale (not just the company domain but also the blog posts of the founders' websites), has gotten to the frontpage within minutes, with a full 100% hit rate. This cannot happen for any company, any project or anything else to be honest since ther…

I haven't been offended by it, and I'm the founder of a company that's been around longer and is probably the closest competitor: https://www.zerotier.com/ I don't hate on people for doing similar things. If anything I am absolutely shocked it took someone this long, since to me the idea of a full mesh virtual network is how things should work, everything else is stupid and clunky, the fact that we have to bounce off…

(Tailscale co-founder here). I also loved Crawshaw's post. It really took me back, though I certainly wasn't doing the kind of hacking he was.

I, for one, really appreciate the nod. I agree our motivations align and I look forward to hearing more about what you and team come up with. All the best on things at ZeroTier.

Re: Tailscale has reached general availability

#64

Post by dang »

armaxt wrote: post #10

I will get banned for this in a matter of minutes but I will say the truth to whoever think HN is fair. For the past 3 months, every, again EVERY post that was linked to Tailscale (not just the company domain but also the blog posts of the founders' websites), has gotten to the frontpage within minutes, with a full 100% hit rate. This cannot happen for any company, any project or anything else to be honest since ther…

> Thank you HN for proving me right

You've been proven nothing of the sort. I buried your post and the submission itself while investigating this claim, even though you've been trolling HN threads with these rants for weeks now, using multiple accounts to do it, ignoring our requests to stop breaking the site guidelines, and barraging us with ranty emails to boot.

I've looked closely at the data and found no evidence for any of this. Every sentence in your comment is either demonstrably false or completely unsupported.

I know that sometimes a bee gets into one's bonnet, but as I've explained to you a dozen times or so, all we can do is look at the data, and if reality conflicts with what you're saying, we have to go with reality. Actually, I appreciate your underlying concern for the integrity of this site. (Not so much the smears and accusations of corruption.)

Your real sin, though, is wasting our time. That sucks precious resources away from doing what we ought to be doing to make HN better. I haven't had a chance to attend to the front page for the last several hours because I've been busy looking into this, writing about it, and dealing with your posts and emails. Meanwhile other emails pointing out quality concerns in other threads have been piling up in the inbox.

Even though it's tedious, I've assembled a sample of what you've been posting so that readers can evaluate your claims for themselves, and also see how much damage a single disgruntled user can do to this place. In the future, we can refer concerns back here and hopefully not lose so much time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465402

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22645796

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587268

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22646808

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223423

This was a pleasant one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22652042

In the past, you've had similar campaigns against other sites and topics, including Go, Kubernetes, IndieHackers, Keybase, DuckDuckGo, Mailchimp, and (yes) the Qataris:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361860

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22329624

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190633

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22211243

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109987

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048852

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22112625

Re: Tailscale has reached general availability

#66

Post by arcticfox »

camgunz wrote: post #44
armaxt wrote: post #10

I will get banned for this in a matter of minutes but I will say the truth to whoever think HN is fair. For the past 3 months, every, again EVERY post that was linked to Tailscale (not just the company domain but also the blog posts of the founders' websites), has gotten to the frontpage within minutes, with a full 100% hit rate. This cannot happen for any company, any project or anything else to be honest since ther…

Eh, as a datapoint in the other column, I'm genuinely interested in whatever bradfitz and apenwarr are working on. It could just be general fame.

I upvote everything about Tailscale because I love it and any information that comes up about it. If it wasn't for my long and boring history on HN, I'd probably look like an astroturfer to an algorithm.

Re: Tailscale has reached general availability

#67

Post by dang »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #37
symplee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should the list of who upvotes an article be public? When I make a comment, my username is displayed. If upvotes and their timestamps were public, it would make it a lot easier for the community to get to the bottom of any funny business like OP is describing.

This is a great idea, but will never happen because all the YC founders would be against it for obvious reasons. EDIT: Slightly altering it a bit. What if only the first 50 upvotes were public?

It will never happen, but that's not the reason. The reason is that voting data is an extremely intimate reflection of users' feelings and beliefs. None of us would want that picture of ourselves to become public, and I shudder to think of what people would do to each other with the information.

Re: Tailscale has reached general availability

#68

Post by dfcarney »

sho wrote: post #30

I've said this before - I really love the concept but I can't get past the pricing. I don't think I'm cheap, but I work in a startup and have to justify what I spend, and USD$10/user/month is very steep for the hard-to-explain benefit of doing away with jump servers. I already use Wireguard, I have a script to add users, update configs and bounce the servers.. it's not as cool and automatic and "zero trust" but it al…

(Tailscale co-founder here). I certainly appreciate the feedback and suggestions. We've had pricing inquiries from individuals all the way to enterprise. Finding the right set of features at the right price is something we're going to spend a lot of time exploring (for instance, some larger companies don't care too much about ACLs, but some smaller ones really, really do). Right now, all I can say for certain is that our pricing page will change and that we're open to discussion.

I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on where you think we can add value and what it might be worth to you. If you're up for it, please email me at dfcarney@tailscale.com Regardless, thanks again for the input.

Re: Tailscale has reached general availability

#69

Post by dang »

mattbee wrote: post #48
symplee wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should the list of who upvotes an article be public? When I make a comment, my username is displayed. If upvotes and their timestamps were public, it would make it a lot easier for the community to get to the bottom of any funny business like OP is describing.

What alterations could HN make to the front page weighting algorithm that tries to spot and penalise voting rings? e.g. if you're someone who routinely upvotes posts within minutes, maybe your vote could count for less than an account that only dips in to the new page occasionally? Or maybe your vote gets penalised if it's your only upvote in a 24 hour period? Or maybe HN keeps track of who you upvote with , and your…

Voting ring detection has been one of HN's priorities for over 12 years:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

I've personally spent hundreds of hours working on this, as well as tracking down voting rings of every imaginable sort. I'd never claim that our software catches everything, but I can tell you that it catches so much that I often go through the lists to find examples of good projects that people were trying ineptly to promote, and invite them to do it again in a way that is more likely to gain community interest.

Re: Tailscale has reached general availability

#70

Post by TechBro8615 »

dang wrote: post #67
TechBro8615 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great idea, but will never happen because all the YC founders would be against it for obvious reasons. EDIT: Slightly altering it a bit. What if only the first 50 upvotes were public?

It will never happen, but that's not the reason. The reason is that voting data is an extremely intimate reflection of users' feelings and beliefs. None of us would want that picture of ourselves to become public, and I shudder to think of what people would do to each other with the information.

I agree with this. But do you think only showing the first X votes could help resolve it? If you want to keep your upvote private, don't upvote if there are < X votes.
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