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Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

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Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#101

Post by linsomniac »

aliasxneo wrote: post #18
infinityio wrote: post #7

For people for which the SaaSiness of Tailscale would be the main deciding factor, it is important to note that this article completely fails to mention Headscale, a BSD-licenced tailscale-compatible coordination server under active development

We tried switching to Headscale recently...it was not a pleasant experience. I'm sure with more time in the oven, it will eventually become a comparable replacement, but I wouldn't be relying on it for anything production oriented.

Just for a counterpoint: I've been running headscale for 11 months, with just over 100 tailscale nodes, and it's been pretty good. There was one version upgrade that completely exploded memory use (it originally was running on a 1 or 2GB VM, with the upgrade I had to switch to 16GB to avoid thrashing), but that was fairly quickly resolved.

I would say it's been a pleasant experience, headscale and the headscale devs have been fantastic.

However, I would also agree with the statement that I wouldn't use it in production. In particular: I was hoping to use it as an overlay network for basically all traffic, between production machines and to user workstations. For the overlay network, my biggest fear there is that when headscale goes down, the entire network pretty much immediately stops responding. The usual case for this is when I make an ACL update and make an error, the entire overlay is down until I get the ACL fixed.

For replacing our OpenVPN, headscale+tailscale is going to be a clear win.

For the overlay network, I probably should go with Nebula. Headscale has these things over Nebula: Easier user onboarding (users can just login, no key exchange required), tailscale was able to route around some network problems we saw in Comcast (though it sounds like Nebula has experimental ability to do that now), and headscale has vastly better ACLs. Tailscale's are even better. Another downside of tailscale is that you can only connect to one tailnet at a time, so you can't have a "work" and "home" tailnet and be connected to both -- you have to switch.

Nebula has the benefit that there is no coordination server, so no worries about that going down. Even in the case of the Defined Networking SaaS, an outage of the control plane would just interfere with the ability to manage the network, until keys start expiring your network will continue to work.

ZeroTier also is very good, I'd classify it as closer to Tailscale, but it does have the ability to connect to multiple networks. ZeroTier in many ways is very slick, but I ended up removing it from my list of options because of a bad interactions with their sales team. It's ACLs are pretty obtuse though.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#102

Post by [deleted] »

hk__2 wrote: post #71
crawshaw wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Tailscalar) The client is completely open source on open source operating systems. The repository you linked to is 100% of the client for Linux, and there's another repository for Android. As a bonus you can run the open source client on closed source OSs, i.e. macOS, WSL2. We never open sourced our coordination server because Headscale beat us to it.

> We never open sourced our coordination server because Headscale beat us to it. From what I understand, Headscale has not all the capabilities of Tailscale’s server. Excerpt from Headscale’s README: > Headscale's goal is to provide self-hosters and hobbyists with an open-source server they can use for their projects and labs. It implements a narrow scope , a single Tailnet, suitable for a personal use, or a small op…

[deleted]

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#103

Post by freedomben »

crawshaw wrote: post #70
tailspin2019 wrote: post #24

> Narrowlink and Tailscale are two open source solutions with different architectures that enable secure remote access and connectivity across networks. A nitpick, but ironically I think they're being generous to Tailscale there. Tailscale isn't really "open source" - or at least not without heavy qualification. I'm not an open source zealot by any means but that line just seems a little misleading. The clients are p…

(Tailscalar) The client is completely open source on open source operating systems. The repository you linked to is 100% of the client for Linux, and there's another repository for Android. As a bonus you can run the open source client on closed source OSs, i.e. macOS, WSL2. We never open sourced our coordination server because Headscale beat us to it.

I'm a big open source advocate and would be heavily critical if the Linux and Android clients weren't open source, but I don't see how a person can complain about tailscale being closed source on an operating system like Macos or iphone or Windows, when the entire platform practically is closed. Such person clearly does not have a problem or concern about using proprietary and closed systems. I think tailscales position here makes a lot of sense, and if it bothers somebody because they see the tremendous value in open source, I hope it would cause them to consider their platform of choice.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#104

Post by gabeio »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #64

I think Defined Networking[1] is also in this category, but I haven't seen too many comparisons. I have heard very good things. [1]: https://www.defined.net/

Interesting. I thought recognized the logo, apparently seems to be a commercial support offering of https://github.com/slackhq/nebula and they support the "nebula" iOS app. I had been using for nebula/defined in the past.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#105

Post by dsissitka »

p_l wrote: post #95
lloeki wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The client is completely open source on open source operating systems. IOW it's by and large the GUI part that is not open source. Personally I prefer to run it as a system LaunchDaemon than a user LaunchAgent anyway. > We never open sourced our coordination server because Headscale beat us to it. I seem to recall reading that another reason was that there was intent to open source it but it made little sense as fa…

the GUI part is also open source (I went looking recently in hope of adding support for `tailscale switch` on android). It's just in surprisingly weird toolkits :)

Their clients consist of a daemon and, optionally, a GUI. The daemon is open source. The Android and Linux GUIs are open source but the Windows, iOS, and macOS GUIs aren't.

Source: https://tailscale.com/opensource/

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#106

Post by linsomniac »

linsomniac wrote: post #101
aliasxneo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We tried switching to Headscale recently...it was not a pleasant experience. I'm sure with more time in the oven, it will eventually become a comparable replacement, but I wouldn't be relying on it for anything production oriented.

Just for a counterpoint: I've been running headscale for 11 months, with just over 100 tailscale nodes, and it's been pretty good. There was one version upgrade that completely exploded memory use (it originally was running on a 1 or 2GB VM, with the upgrade I had to switch to 16GB to avoid thrashing), but that was fairly quickly resolved. I would say it's been a pleasant experience, headscale and the headscale devs…

Oh, another slight minus of tailscale is it's manipulation of the system firewall rules, so if you have other firewall manipulation, in particular if you manage large rulesets via iptables-restore from a rules file, tailscale can lose it's rules. On the plus side "tailscale status" will report "health" issues in that case to point you in the right direction.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#107

Post by p_l »

yebyen wrote: post #86
midasuni wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn’t AGPL usable?

It isn't usable if your goal is to take the open source project and turn it into a component of your own commercial product that is for sale and is closed-source. But I think more than half of the people in this thread have the opposite opinion (that if it isn't open source, it isn't usable) and I tend to agree with that.

it's also isn't usable if you're going to need to modify it, even if something trivial like patches to work on your internal historically complicated stack, then due to legal bugs in AGPL you might find yourself never compliant with the license.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#108

Post by madeofpalk »

fragmede wrote: post #23
bootsmann wrote: post #3

This article is classic SEO fluff right? The Q&A style answering exactly the type of questions that people comparing the two would write into google search.

What makes it "fluff" to you? My definition of "fluff" is that it doesn't answer my question, and that I walk away from it with no idea what the product even is. This is mostly concrete and I can tell you roughly what Narrowlink is and isn't after reading their (misspelled) page. Something like: "Introducing NarrowLink, the world's most advanced and secure VPN solution! With our cutting-edge technology, you'll experi…

It's SEO spam. You might find it helpful, but that doesn't detract from the obvious nature that, for better or worse, it's design to rank in google and capture clicks.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#109

Post by philsnow »

esafak wrote: post #22
bootsmann wrote: post #3

This article is classic SEO fluff right? The Q&A style answering exactly the type of questions that people comparing the two would write into google search.

That's marketing: clarifying positioning. Everybody startup should write such pages.

If you want a search term for more info about it, this kind of article specifically falls under "content marketing", in this case it's a high-converting type called a "versus page".

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#110

Post by SequoiaHope »

p_l wrote: post #96
SequoiaHope wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I just feel better recommending something to people if I know the service is 100% open source. I don’t care if the code includes stuff “no one wants”. I’m a talescale user and I love it, but I do feel a bit weird using and recommending a service with important bits that are proprietary. At the same time, part of why I like the service is that it’s dead simple to use. I imagine headscale takes more effort t…

Having recently put some work to essentially sell headscale-as-a-service (to clients that for various reasons wouldn't want to pay tailscale anyway even if they found the service great), about only issues between tailscale and headscale are that headscale got a bit of cruft regarding internal models that are currently being worked on, and for practical purposes it shows up in a bit harder time handling ACLs and no ta…

It strikes me that if you had to build a service platform, then that shows me there is a difference in the systems from a user perspective. I am a very technical user but I do NOT want to spend my time configuring network stuff, that's the whole reason I use tailscale. The fact that headscale is self hosted immediately creates barriers that tailscale does not have. I already host several web servers and it a huge pain that I want to do less of. (Everything is fine on digitalocean until some update does something weird and I have to spend a few days debugging it).
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