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Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

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Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also created memcached, livejournal... Brad has a long list of impressive work.

I wish his perkeep project was mature and stable.

Same.

But Tailscale keeps sucking me in with new stuff to do. :(

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#26
post #3

I did the homemade version of this for years just with SSH forwarding and nginx reverse proxy

but without nat traversal...

Is NAT traversal actually that big of a feature? The category of people that would use a tool like this already knows many ways to do it without NAT getting in the way.

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#27
post #4

i like that it removes tailscale proprietary. if that is goal then why not go 100% open source to eliminate the ts derp control as well and get full sovereignty? like netbird, openziti, zerotier, etc.

Umm, we have a full opensource Tailscale stack now?

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#29
post #5

>"like netcat, but over Tailscale's data plane" Half of the Software offering nowadays seems to be selling vendor lock-in at no added value and then making a profit. Sure there's always some negligible added value, and then they reinvent a whole stack for their ecosystem. In the case of tailscale the added value seems to be avoiding going into your router and activating port forwarding? It looks like negative added v…

...this is a github repo. Pointing to an open source project. That is not forced to use any vendor-specific systems to function.

It's a pattern that occurs in commercial software yes, but Open Source has its own version of building mirror ecosystems. Collaborating to bleeding edge issues on robust infrastructure is very hard, so junior engineers that want to collaborate in open source (often for reputation building) can do so in these mirror ecosystems, it's an added bonus if they believe that they are contributing to the bleeding edge instead of rebuilding an enantiomer tech stack.

Re: Tailcat – Like netcat, but over Tailscale’s data plane

#30

I enjoy that they supply a nix install/environment, similar to the main tailscale/tailscale repo. Is nix widespread or the standard dev environment at tailscale, or is it like a 10% option and most people just use Docker or whatever?

It's not our standard dev environment but some of us use Nix. We don't really use Docker much, though. Mostly just "go test" etc.
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