Live data from Hacker News

Tailscale Peer Relays

tailscale.com

111–118 of 118 posts

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#112
post #66

You can use Tailscale to connect services together (not just someone's laptop to a service, replacing OpenVPN), but what if Tailscale has an outage? Will my services not be able to find each other anymore?

The tailscale login servers had an issue last week. My local network had an issue at the same time and all connections dropped. Then none of my stuff could reconnect because I couldnt connect to tailscale :( Looking into setting up my own headscale instance now. This is the first issue I’ve had with tailscale but seems dumb that my local lan devices couldn’t even talk to each other.

(Tailscalar here) We're taking this kind of outage very seriously. In particular this outage meant newly connected devices couldn't reliably reach our control plane and couldn't get the latest network state. IMO that's not okay.

One of Tailscale's fundamental promises is that we want to try as much as possible to get our control plane and infrastructure as out of the way of your connectivity paths, while still using our infra to "assist" when there's connectivity issues (like difficult to traverse NAT), and maintain trust across the network, and keep everything up to date.

It's a tough balance and this year we're dedicating resources to making sure even small blips in our control plane don't mean temporary losses of connectivity across even your newly woken up devices. In particular we're taking a multi-pronged approach, right now. We're working in parallel to increase client tolerance of control outages (in response to cracks shown in this incident) and have an ongoing effort to make the control plane more resilient and available.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#113
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nebula has NAT traversal and failover relaying I beleve, but not magic dns

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#114

This was better solved by tinc about 20 years ago. All tinc nodes can work as relays (but you can disallow that if you want), it does not rely on a centralized server, and works fine without access to the internet. It is a true mesh. The world would be better served by porting tinc to wireguard and some memory safe language instead of reimplementing parts of its functionality from scratch.

I remember using Tinc a lot and really liking it. But as 1gbit+ speeds became more common, tinc struggled to maintain that much throughput on lowend hardware.

I also didn't know that tinc was still around, I might give it a try again just to play around with it and see what's changed.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#115
(in)convenient timing. I just recently implemented a mesh network using wireguard+bgp so that all nodes can connect to each other one way or another. This would have probably been a lot easier for almost the same result.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#116
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Nebula has NAT traversal and failover relaying I beleve, but not magic dns

This is correct, and the lack of a MagicDNS solution is definitely felt when using Nebula (esp. when switching from Tailscale)

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#117

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…

I am personally happy to use Tailscale directly so I don't know. There isn't anything better out there though.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays

#118

Tailscale playing catchup to netbird...

What is the equivalent feature of netbird? Can you link the documentation please?

It's using a turn server to provide the DERP feature (in the case of the quick setup it's coturn but you can use other turn servers). So to create this you just set up more turn servers and add them. It's fairly simple.
Post reply on HN