What this tells me is that I really want something like Tailscale but written in Rust and not requiring a third-party, closed source server for authentication. (yes I know about headscale)
Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
111–120 of 162 posts
Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
#112I am trying to use tailscale for personal project as mesh overlay network, but it is annoying. When you create images in packer, you need to remove state, otherwise nodes would fight over the same IP when created from the same snapshot. AuthKey expiration for infra is 90 making this another secret that you need to manually rotate. When running "tailscale up" with --ssh it hangs ssh connection making Ansible scripts brittle. For non-tech use, the android app is pretty useless. Taildrop is weird, I would like to have NFS over tailnet that you can easily share with others.
It seems that everyone wants to build VPN solution to sell to enterprises. There is probably more profit than building opensource mesh overlay :(
Given all that, I think that narrowlink architecture is flawed and worse than tailscale. Narrowlink gateway is both single point of failure and performance bottleneck (looks a bit like Cisco AnyConnect). Wireguard is very nice and modern protocol, narrowlink would need to implement own custom alternative over https. It would be interesting to see how both perform in very large topologies.
Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
#113I’m more interested in the link stability and latency, any benchmarks for all these products? Nebula/headscale/narrolink?
yes! i found nebula to be slow for instance
Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
#114What’s this about Wireguard leaking metadata? That is the first time I’ve heard the protocol complained about.
Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
#115> 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…
> I understand that [Headscale] is (unofficially?) supported by Tailscale these days I'm not sure if it clears the bar of official , but it seems to be not-unofficial. They were planning on open-sourcing a coordination server once they cleaned the code up, but then decided that there was no point in doing so due to Headscale. On top of that, one of the primary maintainers of Headscale works at Tailscale now. Source:…
Sounds like someone may have thought the code for Headscale "coordination" server was higher quality than the code for Tailscale "coordination" server. If the later needed to be "cleaned up". Maybe there were things in that code Tailscale did not want the public to see.
Funny how Wireguard's original pitch was that it was smaller and simpler than OpenVPN or other alternatives. Now people are commercialising some complex GUI on top of it. More "features" on a steady basis. Some of them might be closed source but pay no mind. "Worse is better".
Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pai…
It's a networking service. Inherently, there are things you will be able to orchestrate easier from a centralized perspective than a self-hosted one.
You're correct to nit-pick the difference between Headscale and Tailscale as software products, but I think this is splitting hairs. There are perfectly valid reasons why both are different. Given Tailscale's featureset as a product, it's not reasonable to expect it's self-hosted alternative to be a pushbutton replacement.
Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
#117Definitely interested in this, however: >Narrowlink uses a centralized gateway that clients and agents connect to over HTTP/S protocols Tunneling TCP over TCP will undoubtedly result in poor network performance. This is why WireGuard is UDP-only.
Hey, I am the creator of Narrowlink. I certainly find your comment valid, and using WireGuard over HTTPS most of the time provides better network performance. However, in very specific cases, Narrowlink demonstrates superior performance. 1- When your devices' routes are not optimal, and utilizing a CDN can enhance the connection due to smart routing. For instance, I have a server in Poland (while I live in Canada) wh…
Thanks for the detailed response. Nice work.
Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I understand that [Headscale] is (unofficially?) supported by Tailscale these days I'm not sure if it clears the bar of official , but it seems to be not-unofficial. They were planning on open-sourcing a coordination server once they cleaned the code up, but then decided that there was no point in doing so due to Headscale. On top of that, one of the primary maintainers of Headscale works at Tailscale now. Source:…
Sounds like someone may have thought the code for Headscale "coordination" server was higher quality than the code for Tailscale "coordination" server. If the later needed to be "cleaned up". Maybe there were things in that code Tailscale did not want the public to see. Funny how Wireguard's original pitch was that it was smaller and simpler than OpenVPN or other alternatives. Now people are commercialising some comp…
There's absolutely nothing stopping you from just using WireGuard if you want to. I don't understand the mentality of complaining about a completely separate entity offering extra features just because you don't personally have a need/want for them.
Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
#119Don't forget Nebula[1]. [1] https://slack.engineering/introducing-nebula-the-open-source...
Nebula is fantastic, absolute love it. We use it in production. Cert management can be a bit of a pain on a large scale but there's an excellent Terraform provider [0] that can help. Coupled with the Terraform ansible provider and a little bit of scripting you can automate anything related to cert provisioning and renewal. [0] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/TelkomIndonesia/nebu...
The Nebula creators actually started their own company after leaving Slack focusing on handling your mentioned pain points with cert management and orchestration: defined.net
Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like someone may have thought the code for Headscale "coordination" server was higher quality than the code for Tailscale "coordination" server. If the later needed to be "cleaned up". Maybe there were things in that code Tailscale did not want the public to see. Funny how Wireguard's original pitch was that it was smaller and simpler than OpenVPN or other alternatives. Now people are commercialising some comp…
There's absolutely nothing stopping you from just using WireGuard if you want to. I don't understand the mentality of complaining about a completely separate entity offering extra features just because you don't personally have a need/want for them.
I don't get the issue with having a tight secure underlying vpn protocol, and others building on top of it to improve deployment and setup/management side of it.