Tailscale vs. Narrowlink • Hacker News Board

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#121

Post by SadTrombone » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 12:32 AM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #108

fragmede wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it "fluff" to you? My definition of "fluff" is that it doesn't answer my question, and that I walk away from it with no idea what the product even is. This is mostly concrete and I can tell you roughly what Narrowlink is and isn't after reading their (misspelled) page. Something like: "Introducing NarrowLink, the world's most advanced and secure VPN solution! With our cutting-edge technology, you'll experi…

It's SEO spam. You might find it helpful, but that doesn't detract from the obvious nature that, for better or worse, it's design to rank in google and capture clicks.

Search engine optimized doesn't automatically equal "spam", especially when the information is relevant and helpful.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#122

Post by api » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 12:39 AM UTC

yebyen wrote: post #86

midasuni wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn’t AGPL usable?

It isn't usable if your goal is to take the open source project and turn it into a component of your own commercial product that is for sale and is closed-source. But I think more than half of the people in this thread have the opposite opinion (that if it isn't open source, it isn't usable) and I tend to agree with that.

AFAIK if you are the owner of the copyright / original author you can use it however you see fit. The license applies to third parties.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#123

Post by SadTrombone » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 12:39 AM UTC

cchance wrote: post #120

SadTrombone wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's absolutely nothing stopping you from just using WireGuard if you want to. I don't understand the mentality of complaining about a completely separate entity offering extra features just because you don't personally have a need/want for them.

I don't get the issue with having a tight secure underlying vpn protocol, and others building on top of it to improve deployment and setup/management side of it.

Agreed. I don't think people recognize how much of a pain cert management/orchestration can be, and Tailscale's value adds like MagicDNS and managing/creating SSH keys for logging into servers are significant QoL improvements. Sure, you can do that stuff on your own, but I simply don't want to.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#124

Post by Jedd » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 12:43 AM UTC

tailspin2019 wrote: post #24

> Narrowlink and Tailscale are two open source solutions with different architectures that enable secure remote access and connectivity across networks. A nitpick, but ironically I think they're being generous to Tailscale there. Tailscale isn't really "open source" - or at least not without heavy qualification. I'm not an open source zealot by any means but that line just seems a little misleading. The clients are p…

> Tailscale isn't really "open source" ...

As you would have read a few paragraphs further on in TFA they describe the situation with much more clarity:

"Tailscale uses the open source WireGuard protocol, and its client apps are open source, but the coordination services are proprietary."

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#125

Post by d-z-m » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 12:58 AM UTC

Not sure if I'm just bad at reading Rust code, but it looks like the end-to-end encryption is implemented by pre-sharing a symmetric key, and communicating a 24 byte xChacha20Poly1305 nonce over the wire as websockets are established. This key and nonce are subsequently used to encrypt and decrypt messages sent between the two parties. It looks like the encrypt and decrypt functions are called as new websocket traffic is read or written to the stream.

If true, this means that every message sent via this means uses an identical keystream to encrypt all messages, and thus results in a loss of confidentiality of all messages. Am I missing something?

https://github.com/narrowlink/narrowlink/blob/abf35e38567b88...

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#126

Post by dugite-code » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 1:40 AM UTC

reilly3000 wrote: post #114

What’s this about Wireguard leaking metadata? That is the first time I’ve heard the protocol complained about.

From my read of the article it's mainly from the peer to peer nature of the setup. With Tailscale and wireguard you know where traffic is coming from and where it is going as it's not going through a central gateway.

You also can find out it's VPN data as it isn't tunnled over https or using any other masking methodology.

I belive you wouldn't find anything out about the data inside the wireguard tunnel just the wireguard tunnel metadata.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#127

Post by rsyring » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 2:15 AM UTC

Nezteb wrote: post #74

I've tried Tailscale, Headscale, Nebula, Netmaker, OpenZiti, wg-easy, and a few other niche overlay network and VPN tools. Each time I still end up using Firezone [1] when I need a simple wrapper over Wireguard. [1] https://www.firezone.dev/

Firezone is a traditional VPN architecture. It's not a mesh overlay network.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#128

Post by folex » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 2:44 AM UTC

https://github.com/narrowlink/narrowlink/blob/main/agent/src...

mhm. single-handedly, though.

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#129

Post by anderspitman » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 3:01 AM UTC

SajjadPourali wrote: post #97

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #16

Definitely interested in this, however: >Narrowlink uses a centralized gateway that clients and agents connect to over HTTP/S protocols Tunneling TCP over TCP will undoubtedly result in poor network performance. This is why WireGuard is UDP-only.

Hey, I am the creator of Narrowlink. I certainly find your comment valid, and using WireGuard over HTTPS most of the time provides better network performance. However, in very specific cases, Narrowlink demonstrates superior performance. 1- When your devices' routes are not optimal, and utilizing a CDN can enhance the connection due to smart routing. For instance, I have a server in Poland (while I live in Canada) wh…

Do you have an overview anywhere of the protocol you're using to encapsulate TCP in HTTP? Why did you go with HTTP instead of WebSockets? Does Narrowlink support UDP?

Sorry for so many questions

Re: Tailscale vs. Narrowlink

#130

Post by SajjadPourali » Sat, Aug 12, 2023, 3:41 AM UTC

anderspitman wrote: post #129

SajjadPourali wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I am the creator of Narrowlink. I certainly find your comment valid, and using WireGuard over HTTPS most of the time provides better network performance. However, in very specific cases, Narrowlink demonstrates superior performance. 1- When your devices' routes are not optimal, and utilizing a CDN can enhance the connection due to smart routing. For instance, I have a server in Poland (while I live in Canada) wh…

Do you have an overview anywhere of the protocol you're using to encapsulate TCP in HTTP? Why did you go with HTTP instead of WebSockets? Does Narrowlink support UDP? Sorry for so many questions

Narrowlink uses the HTTP/S (WebSocket) protocol as transport; it encapsulates and decapsulates TCP and UDP connections on top of it. This means both UDP/TCP tunneling methods are available out of the box. For example, the following screenshot shows a UDP tunnel for DNS purposes and its encapsulated traffic as TLS (HTTPS+WebSocket=WSS). https://i.ibb.co/wcHB8g2/udp.png

I also invite you to continue the discussion on the github https://github.com/narrowlink/narrowlink/discussions

You are most welcome