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Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

narrowlink.com

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Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#131

Post by e12e »

Chyzwar wrote: post #112

I 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 b…

> I would like to have NFS over tailnet that you can easily share with others.

Anything stopping you there? Other than NFS being NFS?

CIFS/Samba or WebDAV should work fine?

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#132

Post by mbreese »

SadTrombone wrote: post #123
cchance wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed. I don't think people recognize how much of a pain cert management/orchestration can be, and Tailscale's value adds like MagicDNS and managing/creating SSH keys for logging into servers are significant QoL improvements. Sure, you can do that stuff on your own, but I simply don't want to.

I do run my own Wireguard VPN at home. It’s not terrible for a few clients with a set home dyndns or static IP.

It has basically taught me how the small building blocks for Wireguard work. And how for anything remotely more difficult or multi-user I’d absolutely want something more robust handling the orchestration and management of the network. It is very hard to get right and can be very complicated to keep everything in sync. There is definitely value to what Tailscale, et al deliver.

I’m happy that I can run a simple version myself, but only after doing that can you really appreciate where the dragons be.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#134

Post by FL410 »

jdoss wrote: post #63
PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used Nebula to build a cross-cloud Nomad cluster, very underrated and does 99% of what you'd want from Tailscale.

Hey me too and I fully agree! Nebula is super underrated in this market space. I use Nebula to connect my primary datacenter rack with a bunch of dedicated servers and VMs all together on an overlay network. This makes it easy for me to add Nomad client nodes quickly in different parts of the world and everything just works. I actually use https://defined.net for a managed Nebula experience and it makes everything su…

Same, I love Nebula/Defined

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#135

Post by tharos47 »

Chyzwar wrote: post #112

I 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 b…

You can disable key expiration for the machine via the web UI.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#136

Post by Chyzwar »

tharos47 wrote: post #135
Chyzwar wrote: post #112

I 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 b…

You can disable key expiration for the machine via the web UI.

Yes, but auth key is only valid for 90 days. If you put your Auth key in secrets, and you want to add new machine via CI/CD you need to rotate key every 90 days.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#137

Post by Chyzwar »

e12e wrote: post #131
Chyzwar wrote: post #112

I 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 b…

> I would like to have NFS over tailnet that you can easily share with others. Anything stopping you there? Other than NFS being NFS? CIFS/Samba or WebDAV should work fine?

If you already have mesh network and client application installed, why not extend this for easy network sharing?

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#138

Post by dathinab »

d-z-m wrote: post #125

Not sure if I'm just bad at reading Rust code, but it looks like the end-to-end encryption is implemented by pre-sharing a symmetric key, and communicating a 24 byte xChacha20Poly1305 nonce over the wire as websockets are established. This key and nonce are subsequently used to encrypt and decrypt messages sent between the two parties. It looks like the encrypt and decrypt functions are called as new websocket traffi…

(Disclaimer: not related to the referenced narrowlink code, but the sentiment of the parent post)

I which stuff like libsodium would be both more widely available and more widely used.

And with "stuff" I don't mean the internal core primitives but the slightly more higher level helper which often try (in the limits of C) limit miss use and have reasonable good documentation.

E.g. crypto_secretstream_xchacha20poly1305* from https://doc.libsodium.org/secret-key_cryptography /secretstream

Because while by now most people have understood that inventing/putting together their own low level crypto primitives is a bad idea, people using existing low level primitives to invent their own "mid level" primitives still happen more often then healthy in the industry.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#139

Post by dathinab »

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.

It's a marketing article.

And as any marketing article it's also SEO optimized, I mean it would be strange if not. But it's core point is still marketing not SEO.

I would guess there are two possible (non exclusive) reasons:

- people ask all the time how this is different from Tailscale

- they want to take advantage of Tailsacle publicity (and AFIK succeeded)

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#140

Post by 3np »

> Narrowlink uses a centralized gateway to which clients and agents connect over HTTP/S protocols. The gateway handles routing and connections between agents behind firewalls/NAT and clients.

> Tailscale uses a centralized configuration management system to define devices, access control policies, etc. Traffic is routed through the Tailscale cloud services to facilitate connections between devices.

To clarify: Traffic _may_ be routed through Tailscale cloud services but the centralized Tailscale service is used primarily to coordinate configuration and only secondary as tunnel. If it goes down, the existing tailnet will keep functioning. In contrast, the Narrowlink gateway is an inherent central point-of-failure which all traffic needs to be routed through.

From a quick look this looks like one of the major deciding factors between the two. Would be great to hear if there are any intentions to make a future version of Narrowlink address this downside and make it into an actual mesh network.

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