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Add ability to choose a custom coordination server

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Re: Add ability to choose a custom coordination server

#31

If you're looking for a tailscale alternative (ish), I built a plugin for HashiCorp Vault to manage Wireguard keys: https://github.com/candiddev/vault-plugin-secrets-wireguard It's a bit more involved than Tailscale with the benefit that it uses Vault's robust authentication options.

It's a shame that this is getting downvotes. This looks fantastic. Thank you for posting it.

Re: Add ability to choose a custom coordination server

#33
post #5

Its really impressive how much Tailscale care about the UX of the whole product all the way down to the level of not over complicating their menus. The whole Tailscale experience for an enduser (ie not Tailscale admin) is so much nicer than compared with something like OpenVPN in a place without MDM.

This idea of "protecting the users from themselves" can be dangerous. Several very large corporations are currently telling their users to do very insecure things because telling them to use an extra option in some circumstances would be too confusing for their puny brains. Even though it's a security feature and doing things securely is kind of a big deal.

An extra field in an "Advanced Settings" menu should not need to be hidden behind some "Press About 5 times" secret gauntlet. Users are not so stupid that they will fill out an "Advanced" form field they don't understand, and even if they do, you can always make a connection attempt to see if the input was valid.

Re: Add ability to choose a custom coordination server

#34
post #14

This is a a beautiful thread. All the concerns that come into play with a commercial business, a very human representative of that business, and someone outside expressing a need. A need that some would see is contradictory to the pure business goals. Doing business out in the open like Tailscale is doing is so refreshing. Having seen Brad Fitz communicate in other places, it is obvious he isn't doing the right thing…

The people on that thread are very dope. I've filed tickets with Denton before and he's ridiculously thorough. My mesh is a little complicated on my side, and he was super patient as I walked through the relevant stages of determining where and why I was getting packet loss.

Re: Add ability to choose a custom coordination server

#35
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailscale employee here: In general the OSS operating systems get OSS clients, whereas the closed-source ones don’t necessarily get the full OSS treatment.

Appreciate the reply, Tailscaler. That makes sense and seems like a legitimate line to draw. Being a little bit of a pain, I would point out that the Google Play store and Google's components for Android are not open source. If you're willing to make Tailscale available via Google Play, and open source the client, maybe iOS can as well? And while we're at it, macOS apps can be installed out of band of an app store, s…

I'm not a Tailscale employee, but Tailscale works on FireTV, so it is clearly not reliant on Google-provided services. They also provide a build for F-droid from the same code base that doesn't use any external services. https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale-android/blob/main/and...

As far as I can tell, the only Google Play Services API the app distributed on the Play Store uses is Google account authentication via the Play Services Google account picker.

Re: Add ability to choose a custom coordination server

#36
No doubt, Tailscale people are awesome.

From a security perspective, I would design this feature differently. If the capability to change the control server exists, then, rather than hiding it, I would want to see a prominent UI element displaying the control server name, url and "more details" to the user to see before they connect/login.

This is important to prevent any social engineering based security hacks.

Re: Add ability to choose a custom coordination server

#37
post #8
post #5

Its really impressive how much Tailscale care about the UX of the whole product all the way down to the level of not over complicating their menus. The whole Tailscale experience for an enduser (ie not Tailscale admin) is so much nicer than compared with something like OpenVPN in a place without MDM.

> down to the level of not over complicating their menus to be fair, their mobile UX has plenty of warts and behaviors that don't match platform expectations and are confusing (like what happens when you tap on any of the listed machines that you have access to). This one seems to at least have been partially motivated by making sure that accessing tailscale without paying is not too visible. I'm saying this as a hug…

>> making sure that accessing tailscale without paying is not too visible.

Not sure what this means, Tailscale is free for the vast majority of non-corporate users, and I would imagine that anyone who's using it so intensely that they need the "personal pro" plan is probably someone techie enough to dig around and find out about headscale.

Also headscale isn't entirely free if you're paying for a VPS or other server to host it on.

Re: Add ability to choose a custom coordination server

#38

If you're looking for a tailscale alternative (ish), I built a plugin for HashiCorp Vault to manage Wireguard keys: https://github.com/candiddev/vault-plugin-secrets-wireguard It's a bit more involved than Tailscale with the benefit that it uses Vault's robust authentication options.

Does the vault read command produce a full mesh network? I’m assuming that’s what it does, but it isn’t spelled out in the readme.

Re: Add ability to choose a custom coordination server

#39
post #28

Interesting. I would never use a hosted VPN service because I want to be the only one who controls access. For this reason I don't use something like ZeroTier either (even though that can technically be self-hosted, it's not easy). But Mesh VPN is a great option. I wonder if Headscale can also use internal credentials? As far as I remember with tailscale you had to log in with Google or Microsoft which is another tot…

>I wonder if Headscale can also use internal credentials? As far as I remember with tailscale you had to log in with Google or Microsoft which is another total deal-breaker. But I haven't looked at it in ages as the hosted variety was a non starter anyway. from the project page: https://github.com/juanfont/headscale >Node registration > • Single-Sign-On (via Open ID Connect) > • Pre authenticated key

Hmm, the SSO is too cumbersome with me (I don't want to set up my own OpenID service just for this). The preauth key might work though. I'll try it out!
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