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Headscale: Open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server

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Re: Headscale: Open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server

#12

The ZeroTier ecosystem has a number of open source self-hosted controller projects for those who want unlimited members/networks/admins. - https://github.com/key-networks/ztncui (the most popular one, GUI) - https://github.com/dec0dOS/zero-ui (GUI) - https://github.com/thedunston/bash_cli_zt (CLI)

IANAL How might this interact with the ZeroTier BSL license? Would self hosting an alternative controller combined with BSL licensed clients violate the license (for commercial purposes)?

No, not if you're not selling ZeroTier as a for-profit SaaS product or building it into a closed product.

Re: Headscale: Open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server

#14

Another similar project to Tailscale, for those in the market: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula Crazy simple, fully open source, trivial to self-host. Maybe not as featureful as Tailscale, but imo that can be a feature unto itself.

I've been using Nebula for personal use and it's really great. I have a free Oracle Cloud vm as my "lighthouse."

The advantage of Nebula is that it's dead simple. Generate a keypair, copy it over, copy the config file, and go. It can do mesh routing for the vpn and traverse nat magically. You can delegate dns to the lighthouse and name resolution just works too.

That simplicity is awesome for personal use, and maybe it's good enough for a small operation, but I'm guessing it doesn't have all the bells and whistles you'd want for medium or larger companies.

Re: Headscale: Open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server

#15

Another similar project to Tailscale, for those in the market: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula Crazy simple, fully open source, trivial to self-host. Maybe not as featureful as Tailscale, but imo that can be a feature unto itself.

innernet[1] is another similar one

[1]: https://github.com/tonarino/innernet

Re: Headscale: Open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server

#16

Another similar project to Tailscale, for those in the market: https://github.com/slackhq/nebula Crazy simple, fully open source, trivial to self-host. Maybe not as featureful as Tailscale, but imo that can be a feature unto itself.

I've been using Nebula for personal use and it's really great. I have a free Oracle Cloud vm as my "lighthouse." The advantage of Nebula is that it's dead simple. Generate a keypair, copy it over, copy the config file, and go. It can do mesh routing for the vpn and traverse nat magically. You can delegate dns to the lighthouse and name resolution just works too. That simplicity is awesome for personal use, and maybe…

Nebula transits every EC2-to-EC2 packet at Slack, across lots of AWS regions and tens of thousands of hosts. It’s probably doing petabits of traffic per second. And it’s a safer, more expressive firewall than EC2 security groups.

So, yes, it works for personal use-cases but it works for truly gigantic applications, too.

Re: Headscale: Open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server

#17
so this whole zerocorp/zerotier/encrypted-mesh networking approach is pretty cool, but every time i see it i ask myself: how do you monitor for malicious nodes? in old setups, typically there would be some sort of passive monitoring system that would monitor the traffic between hosts and could be used for forensics/malicious traffic identification. but if you're encrypting traffic at each node for each other node, then only the participant nodes are privy to the traffic. if one or both are compromised, how would you ever know? sure you can run userland security agents on them that collect data, but if the machines are actually compromised, you can't really trust what they say, right? (that's the whole reason why you use a third system for monitoring!)

Re: Headscale: Open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server

#18
Not sure what I think about this.

I don't use Tailscale because I don't trust their key distribution, and this open source project would solve that, but it might undermine Tailscale's sustainability.

This would be a shame because Tailscale is working well with the open source community: open source clients, working well with distros, working well with Linux DNS stack, supporting a more P2P secure Internet, and documenting their well through it.

Re: Headscale: Open-source implementation of the Tailscale control server

#19

Not sure what I think about this. I don't use Tailscale because I don't trust their key distribution, and this open source project would solve that, but it might undermine Tailscale's sustainability. This would be a shame because Tailscale is working well with the open source community: open source clients, working well with distros, working well with Linux DNS stack, supporting a more P2P secure Internet, and docume…

You can possibly buy a subscription but tell the devs that you're using headscale. If enough people do this they might make a host-your-own version like bitwarden.
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