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Tailscale raises $100M

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Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#181

Post by rhuber »

stavros wrote: post #177
rhuber wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Nebula coauthor here) People sometimes ask me to describe the differences between Nebula and Tailscale. One of the most important relates to performance and scale. Nebula can handle the amount of internal network traffic and scalability of nodes (100k+ nodes, constant churn) required on a large network like Slack's, but Tailscale cannot. Tailscale's performance is fine for many situations, but not suitable for infra…

Does Nebula have anything like Tailscale's rules engine? I am absolutely in love with being able to configure all my connections by just specifying a JSON file somewhere. No need to have firewalls, the configuration specifies which service or user can talk to which. That having been said, I also am wary of using Tailscale for the same reasons as above, I have to trust Tailscale and Github? I can maybe justify trustin…

It does! In fact replacing AWS security groups and making them cross region and cross platform was probably the first goal of the project. My coauthor, Nate, wrote Nebula's internal firewall code before we wrote a single line of the actual protocol, because he wanted to ensure it was performant enough for massive scale.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#182

Post by smilespray »

YPPH wrote: post #159
criddell wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, it was their switch to an Electron app. "High security" and "built from dozens of third party libraries and running on a browser" don't belong together.

The choice of tech stack for a desktop application seems like an interesting basis to claim a company has lost touch with its core values.

Moving from a native app to an Electron-based one has a definitive impact on usability. Calling it a tech stack choice is a bit dismissive.

They used to have a kick-ass Mac app. That appealed to a considerable amount of their users. Then they ditched the native app for Electron, and those same users were disappointed.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#183

Post by jgrahamc »

systemvoltage wrote: post #178
nickysielicki wrote: post #111

Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work. The biggest risk that this company has is that…

Well put, there is no moat. Corporate customers really don’t want yet another network infra if they have Cloudflare + ZTN offerings. Cloudflare, please make a box I can buy and stick it in the closet with a WAN connection. Routers suck, it’s time to reinvent them. Also please don’t make them look like goddamn spaceships.

What's this box going to do?

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#184

Post by discardedrefuse »

nickysielicki wrote: post #111

Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work. The biggest risk that this company has is that…

> I’ve been dreaming lately of a tor-like network that’s based loosely on the idea of tailnets. Rather than blockchain bullshit, you’d have a direct ring of trust with friends, and then you could set up access policies to forward packets for people you don’t trust, but who know someone you do trust.

Might want to check out Yggdrasil. It lets you can create a real mesh routed, E2E encrypted network. You can keep your network private, or connect it to the greater network and route others. There's no ring-of-trust (I can't imagine that as a viable solution at scale). But the config file has an AllowedPublicKeys section if you want to specify who can route through your node.

https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-go

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#185

Post by pilif »

bradfitz wrote: post #156
RL_Quine wrote: post #15

Unfortunately despite claiming that they would, they've never allowed their iOS application to allow configuration of the control server (every other client they have released does). Maybe some more funding will allow them to focus on the client quality.

(Tailscale engineer here) That's https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1572 which we haven't given up on. It's just not done. We did it for macOS and we thought the same thing would've worked for iOS (they share ton of the same code) but it apparently didn't work. The mobile apps have been a low priority thus far. We just recently hired some people to work on them, though. The highest priority for them curren…

About the battery usage: what I can’t explain is that there’s a lot of background energy usage on iOS when Tailscale is running even when it’s not connected.

If this was about heart beating, I would expect that to only happen when the client is connected.

Also, in the battery stats, the background usage is there and tailscale is listed, but with - % of battery usage.

However, when I force quit tailscale, all of the background energy usage goes away.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#186

Post by systemvoltage »

ncmncm wrote: post #81
boesboes wrote: post #12

For anyone else who wonders wtf tailscale is: > Tailscale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you own accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly. It enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the open source WireGuard protocol, which means only devices on your private network can communicate with each other. It seems to take care of key distribution, nat-traversal, authen…

I thought that Tailscale was pretty interesting. Avery Pennarun, its CTO, is somebody whose judgment I am used to trusting. Then I learned that to use it, I would be dependent on authenticating using a login on one of the unaccountable internet behemoths who could take away my account for any random reason or no expressed reason at all. No, thank you.

Yes. If they can’t build basic auth and make sure it’s secure, it sends quite the message.

Super annoying and borderline unacceptable.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#187

Post by RL_Quine »

bradfitz wrote: post #156
RL_Quine wrote: post #15

Unfortunately despite claiming that they would, they've never allowed their iOS application to allow configuration of the control server (every other client they have released does). Maybe some more funding will allow them to focus on the client quality.

(Tailscale engineer here) That's https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/1572 which we haven't given up on. It's just not done. We did it for macOS and we thought the same thing would've worked for iOS (they share ton of the same code) but it apparently didn't work. The mobile apps have been a low priority thus far. We just recently hired some people to work on them, though. The highest priority for them curren…

Thanks for the response. I had misinterpreted the communication from Tailscale to be adversarial rather than just that it wasn't something that had engineering focus. It's good to hear that there will be some progress towards making the mobile app better.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#188

Post by zepearl »

boesboes wrote: post #12

For anyone else who wonders wtf tailscale is: > Tailscale is a VPN service that makes the devices and applications you own accessible anywhere in the world, securely and effortlessly. It enables encrypted point-to-point connections using the open source WireGuard protocol, which means only devices on your private network can communicate with each other. It seems to take care of key distribution, nat-traversal, authen…

So basically Wireguard with automated key setup/distribution/identity management?

(btw. I love Wireguard - currenly using it to route traffic between my servers + transfer media between my home and my mother's mediacenter with both PCs being behind their own router - she loves it too as so far there were no problems hehe)

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#190

Post by abetlen »

If you run a Kubernetes cluster for self-hosting software or development I highly recommend setting up a Tailscale subnet router [1]. This will allow you to access any IP (pods or services) in your cluster from any of your Tailscale-connected computers. You can even configure Tailscale DNS to point to the DNS server in your cluster to connect using the service names directly ie. http://my-service.namespace.svc.cluster.local

[1] https://tailscale.com/kb/1185/kubernetes/#subnet-router

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