Live data from Hacker News

Tailscale Peer Relays

tailscale.com

101–110 of 118 posts

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#101
post #98
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When networks get used for unethical or criminal workloads, reliability problems aren’t the tooling's fault. A tiny VPS does the job fine for the rest of us.

What are you talking about? Nothing I am pushing across my mesh is unethical or criminal, from whence these baseless accusations?

I assume the GP assumed that it was pirated media material.

Hundreds of TB over what timeframe? It does seem like quite a bit of data.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#102
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireguard can do what you're describing.

Wireguard can't punch through NATs or firewalls without third party software like Tailscale. Also I'm pretty sure each peer to peer connection needs to be individually set up in a config file ahead of time

My netgear pr460x supports WireGuard with NAT & firewall; granted it’s not a consumer router.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is an open source control plane called headscale which covers almost all of the features for free (while DIY)

People keep saying that, but haven't we learned already that eventually Tailscale gets bought, then priorities change, then they make incompatible changes because they're need to grow, and headscale either can't keep up, or gets pushed away by Tailscale themselves, and we're back to using $TailscaleCompetitor who promises to not do the same thing. Just don't rely on centralized for-profit entities, rely on stuff prod…

While I agree in spirit, I find this logic around for profit FOSS projects a little backwards sometimes, because it implies forking Tailscale wouldn't save much time.

What makes you think we'd be better off building a competitor to something open source if it has all the features we want now? The reason we don't see open source competitors to big products is not because people are too dumb to try it. It's because it's way, way harder. It makes way more sense to Fork and work from there while we're still getting this momentum from Tailscale.

If you think Headscale is going to have problems keeping up with a private Tailscale, good luck rebuilding Tailscale.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is an open source control plane called headscale which covers almost all of the features for free (while DIY)

People keep saying that, but haven't we learned already that eventually Tailscale gets bought, then priorities change, then they make incompatible changes because they're need to grow, and headscale either can't keep up, or gets pushed away by Tailscale themselves, and we're back to using $TailscaleCompetitor who promises to not do the same thing. Just don't rely on centralized for-profit entities, rely on stuff prod…

> Just don't rely on centralized for-profit entities, rely on stuff produced by non-profits and foundations, that you know isn't gonna screw you over as soon as they need money

What do you use that fits that philosophy and offers the basic functionality (NAT traversal, Magic DNS, failover relaying) TS provides?

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for connections coming from their tailnet So instead of whitelisting all ports from IP range 100.64.0.0/10 I would just whitelist e.g. UDP port 12345 coming from IP range 100.64.0.0/10 to my public IP? Or just open up UDP 12345 completely?

I think you need open UDP 12345 to public internet, where the Tailscale Disco protocol runs on that, which is the underlay port.

I would assume you only need to make sure that the other clients can access the UDP port, so not like public internet in the sense of 0.0.0.0/0 but just accessible by other peers, whatever their public facing IP addresses will be.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#106
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireguard can do what you're describing.

Wireguard can't punch through NATs or firewalls without third party software like Tailscale. Also I'm pretty sure each peer to peer connection needs to be individually set up in a config file ahead of time

> Wireguard can't punch through NATs or firewalls without third party software like Tailscale.

That's a false or incorrect statement, I've been using Wireguard and a cheap VPS (actually free on OCI) for several years, and with a cheap VPS at AWS Lightsail before that. No third party software in use at all. The only thing running on the VPS is Wireguard. The only thing running on my peers is Wireguard.

> Also I'm pretty sure each peer to peer connection needs to be individually set up in a config file ahead of time

That's how I do it but there are tools available to make it easy.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It allows customers to make just one firewall exception for connections only coming from their tailnet. You'll need to open a single UDP port on your firewall, so it's your public facing IP address. You don't need an entire VM somewhere, just a single port. Regarding the speed question. You'd use the derp when it's not possible to make a peer to peer connection, which limits your speed to derp server's speed and lo…

> for connections coming from their tailnet So instead of whitelisting all ports from IP range 100.64.0.0/10 I would just whitelist e.g. UDP port 12345 coming from IP range 100.64.0.0/10 to my public IP? Or just open up UDP 12345 completely?

What I understood is similar to making any device accessible on the internet. You would need to open the UDP 12345 on your router and forward the traffic to your server.

It sounds like each peer would first access the peer relay to coordinate how they could establish a direct point-to-point connection with each other.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#108

> We believe our new Tailscale Peer Relays connectivity option—unique to Tailscale—gives customers the best performance and flexibility. Seems pretty similar to some of the stuff ZeroTier was doing years ago. Hard to claim it's unique to Tailscale. Charging for it above and beyond the per user costs seems overboard as well.

I've used ZeroTier in the past and I don't recall a feature similar to this being part of their offering. What I do remember is home brewed crypto, incredibly poor single threaded performance, and a glacial development pace. Any thread about Tailscale inevitably brings up alternatives, but having tried many of them in the past, I've yet to find one that actually competes across all the features and performance. The c…

It's not clear to me if it's different than Zerotier's routing design or not. Partly because ZT has their "moons" and custom network controllers. Googling about it does seem to indicate ZT doesn't support peers routing traffic directly, but you can setup your own DERP style TCP relays.

To me Tailscale is just a nicer version of Zerotier but not in different genre like ftp vs Dropbox. From a general non-power users perspective they operate almost identically.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#109
post #70
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Tailscalar) I'm very bullish on WebTransport in the future, but, it doesn't solve for NAT traversal. I'm watching keenly as well how Iroh gets on with QAD, relatedly. If it all comes together this may well become more magic :D

But this is specifically for relays, so you shouldn't need NAT traversal right? ie in the browser you already know p2p isn't going to work (unless Tailscale implements WebRTC support) so you just go straight to relays for everything. I hadn't heard about iroh using QAD. Thanks for that.

True, the relays currently use http and have a web socket path. The web based ssh client in the admin panel uses this transport.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#110

> We believe our new Tailscale Peer Relays connectivity option—unique to Tailscale—gives customers the best performance and flexibility. Seems pretty similar to some of the stuff ZeroTier was doing years ago. Hard to claim it's unique to Tailscale. Charging for it above and beyond the per user costs seems overboard as well.

I've used ZeroTier in the past and I don't recall a feature similar to this being part of their offering. What I do remember is home brewed crypto, incredibly poor single threaded performance, and a glacial development pace. Any thread about Tailscale inevitably brings up alternatives, but having tried many of them in the past, I've yet to find one that actually competes across all the features and performance. The c…

ZeroTier supports relaying natively. You create a network with three nodes, the "client" (on the internet), the "gateway" (public subnet) and the "server" (private subnet). ZeroTier will automatically route traffic between the client and server through your gateway with no configuration.
Post reply on HN