Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

tailscale.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 267 posts

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#111

Post by Computer0 »

jak6jak wrote: post #102

I looked into tailscale in the past as a way to host a game server such as minecraft on my local machine publicly without port forwarding . It seems that tailscale is mostly configured only to work with people you know and trust. I was hoping that Peer Relays would help alleviate some restrictions with tailwind funnel. Does anyone know any alternatives?

if you have a cheap vps you can use it to forward the traffic to for some benefit, that is what i have been doing when i need compute accessible online and don't want to pay for cloud.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#112

Post by selfmodruntime »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #75

If you're sold on Tailscale due to them "being open" (as they semi-officially support the development of Headscale), keep in mind, that at the same time some of their clients are closed source and proprietary, and thus totally controlled by them and the official distribution channels, like Apple. Some of the arguments given for this stance are just ridiculous: > If users are comfortable running non-open operating sys…

The entire idea is that they make money. Limited licenses are ignored incredibly often.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#114

Post by solarisos »

The shift from managed DERP to decentralized Peer Relays is a massive win for self-hosters with difficult NAT situations. I’m curious if this significantly reduces Tailscale's own egress costs or if the primary goal was just improving latency for users who can't establish a direct WireGuard tunnel. Either way, removing the 'hassle' of setting up a custom DERP server is a great UX improvement.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#115

Post by alexktz »

solarisos wrote: post #114

The shift from managed DERP to decentralized Peer Relays is a massive win for self-hosters with difficult NAT situations. I’m curious if this significantly reduces Tailscale's own egress costs or if the primary goal was just improving latency for users who can't establish a direct WireGuard tunnel. Either way, removing the 'hassle' of setting up a custom DERP server is a great UX improvement.

Alex from Tailscale here... We’re users just like you, and we felt this pain point ourselves. The good news is that Peer Relays were able to build on a lot of the existing subnet router and exit node plumbing, so it wasn’t a huge engineering lift to bring to life.

We also have plenty of customers running in restrictive NAT environments (AWS being a common example), where direct WireGuard tunnels just aren’t always possible. In those cases, something like Peer Relays is essential for Tailscale to perform the way larger deployments expect.

So yes, it improves latency and UX for self-hosters, but it also helps us support more complex production environments without requiring folks to run and manage custom DERP infrastructure.

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#116

Post by timwis »

I'm having a hard time understanding how this is different from a bastion server, where you're tunneling through an intermediary server that you've deployed in the target network.

I guess the difference is the fact that the intermediary server doesn't need a port open (as standard nat punching will work)? Or are there other big differences?

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#117

Post by colordrops »

dblohm7 wrote: post #94
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #75

If you're sold on Tailscale due to them "being open" (as they semi-officially support the development of Headscale), keep in mind, that at the same time some of their clients are closed source and proprietary, and thus totally controlled by them and the official distribution channels, like Apple. Some of the arguments given for this stance are just ridiculous: > If users are comfortable running non-open operating sys…

(Tailscalar here) To be clear: it's only the GUIs that are closed source on selected platforms.

Does that include android?

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#118

Post by dwedge »

jahrichie wrote: post #12

Are you guys using this for OpenClaw or what?

It's a vpn from the original definition before vpn meant a proxy to get around geoblocks. I use tailscale for my home servers, my routers, for servers I have in other houses all behind NAT. I have half a dozen raspberry pi print servers in two warehouses also behind NAT and they can connect to each other and I can connect to them from CGNAT

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#119

Post by hashstring »

riknos314 wrote: post #26
evmar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wrote a blog post addressing this concern: https://tailscale.com/blog/free-plan

The Tl;Dr here is that the cost to them of operating the free tier is lower than what they estimate their Customer Acquisition Cost would be without a free tier, so the free tier generates better leads/conversions to their paid products at a lower cost than traditional sales and marketing. As long as these economics continue to hold they'd be stupid to discontinue the free tier.

Makes me wonder.

Say 5% of the free tier users converts to a paying customer within 5 years. And user growth is constant. Then over time, you will get a much larger free tier user base, compared to your paying customers (in absolute numbers). At some point, it must become tempting to charge all free tier users a little bit to continue, because the group got so big, so there is a lot that can be earned there.

Is this wrong, or should we expect this?

Re: Tailscale Peer Relays is now generally available

#120

Post by varenc »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #75

If you're sold on Tailscale due to them "being open" (as they semi-officially support the development of Headscale), keep in mind, that at the same time some of their clients are closed source and proprietary, and thus totally controlled by them and the official distribution channels, like Apple. Some of the arguments given for this stance are just ridiculous: > If users are comfortable running non-open operating sys…

The CLI version of the Tailscale client on macOS can be compiled from source and installed without the app store:

   go install tailscale.com/cmd/tailscale{,d}@latest
https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/wiki/Tailscaled-on-ma...

So fully available in situations with limited connectivity. The GUI version of the client is closed source though, and it's available as a package or from the app store.

Post reply on HN