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Tailscale is pretty useful

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Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#161

Post by wkat4242 »

mfro wrote: post #114
MasterYoda wrote: post #108

Is there any simple FOSS alternative to tailscale that you can self-host? The only thing I need is to simply connect to the home network and I dont want to need to open and forward ports etc in routers and firewalls for it to work, just something simple plug and play and is secure.

It's functionally just a VPN. Selfhosting wireguard or openvpn is not particularly difficult.

No it's not the same as normal wireguard with some 'just works' config sauce. Devices can connect directly and also find the best way to do it. For example two devices in the same office will create a direct path between them without having to go through the off-site vpn server.

At this mesh vpn is really good.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#162

Post by abdullahkhalids »

danudey wrote: post #120
Trumpi wrote: post #6

I was once in South Africa and needed to look up my prescriptions in the CVS app. I had lost my pills and needed to show a local pharmacist what I needed. CVS geoblocked me. Luckily I had a TailScale exit node running at home, which solved the problem.

I was on a cruise ship a few weeks ago and realized that, instead of being throttled, a lot of sites were completely blocked. Very irritating. They also do DPI on the cruise ship network so that VPN clients like OpenVPN are blocked regardless of port. Without a laptop handy, I had to use my iPhone to set up a droplet running Ubuntu, then install vray onto it and configure it to run on port 443. vray uses "standard" S…

Tor Browser should have worked with the right bridge or proxy.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#163

Post by gabeio »

HPsquared wrote: post #97
Trumpi wrote: post #6

I was once in South Africa and needed to look up my prescriptions in the CVS app. I had lost my pills and needed to show a local pharmacist what I needed. CVS geoblocked me. Luckily I had a TailScale exit node running at home, which solved the problem.

Alternative: OpenVPN server on your router.

> OpenVPN server on your router.

Honestly I would suggest wireguard on your router before openvpn.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#164

Post by sfRattan »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #40

In other words (they do get to this point right away), port forwarding is pretty useful, and most of us don't have it anymore. I'm sick and tired of the way ISPs treat us. It's literally written into my lease what company I will pay for internet, and how much I will pay them. It is not , however, written in my lease how fast the connection will be . Not only am I unable to forward ports, I can't even change my own Wi…

The authoritative bullshit isn't what society is running on, it's what society is giving as an excuse for enshittification that enriches interested parties.

Your landlord (I'm guessing based on having seen it before) gets kickbacks from the ISP to force all tenants onto a specific (probably overpriced) Internet plan. The interest in keeping you from configuring your own router is in allowing the ISP's enshittifying further monetization tactics to proceed unopposed. The two big ones I've seen in this kind of setup are:

Using DNS enforced by the router to gather data and place ads on any 404 error.

Sharing their WiFi network that you lease with the ISP's other customers nearby.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#165

Post by Carrok »

gabeio wrote: post #155
phito wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I don't understand how it is so prevalent in the self-hosted community. I would never install this on my server, just use wireguard/openvpn ... edit: okay, CGNAT

> Yeah, I don't understand how it is so prevalent in the self-hosted community. Not just CGNAT but not having _any_ external ports open can be a beautiful thing. I used to have an ssh port (not on the standard 22) and the amount of auth attempts back then was insane. I now have a full firewall zero open ports but, thanks to tailscale, I can still safely access my machines while not being at home with zero unauthorize…

If you're using only key-auth and have password auth disabled, I'm not sure why unauthorized attempts are a problem.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#166

Post by kdmtctl »

danudey wrote: post #120
Trumpi wrote: post #6

I was once in South Africa and needed to look up my prescriptions in the CVS app. I had lost my pills and needed to show a local pharmacist what I needed. CVS geoblocked me. Luckily I had a TailScale exit node running at home, which solved the problem.

I was on a cruise ship a few weeks ago and realized that, instead of being throttled, a lot of sites were completely blocked. Very irritating. They also do DPI on the cruise ship network so that VPN clients like OpenVPN are blocked regardless of port. Without a laptop handy, I had to use my iPhone to set up a droplet running Ubuntu, then install vray onto it and configure it to run on port 443. vray uses "standard" S…

Wireguard is easy to block. Some VPN providers do implement an obfuscation layer for it, but Tailscale uses plain WG, so if WG is blocked, you will get no connection. Control plane would still work, though.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#167

Post by djsjajah »

simonw wrote: post #19

I used Tailscale the other week to solve a problem where a government website was blocking me from scraping it from GitHub Actions... so I ran an exit node on an Apple TV on my homework and configure the GitHub Actions worker to use that instead. Worked great! https://til.simonwillison.net/tailscale/tailscale-github-act...

You could have also self-hosted the GitHub Actions runner which might have been easier as long as you had something to run the runner on.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#168

Post by harrall »

iamdamian wrote: post #38

I'm curious to hear well-informed reasons from this crowd for why we can trust Tailscale given the non-self-hosted part of the architecture? Does it come down to Tailnet locks [1], not worrying that Tailscale will be compromised, not worrying that your home network is worth compromising, or something else? [1]: https://tailscale.com/kb/1226/tailnet-lock

For me, Tailscale is worth the trouble of not maintaining my own Wireguard setup.

Everything on my home network is set up as if it were public-facing.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#170

Post by hattmall »

epscylonb wrote: post #152
apitman wrote: post #138

Tailscale is one of my favorite companies. They're clearly on to something. Here's a great post by their CTO explaining a lot of the motivation and vision behind it: https://crawshaw.io/blog/remembering-the-lan IMO the main outstanding questions/concerns are: * Is the VPN model really the way to go? If someone gets their hands on one of your Tailscale nodes, they can access every service on your tailnet, which are li…

Agree that they are on to something. I gave a tech talk about them a while ago at work and said that I think they are on the cusp of providing a consumer VPN product that appeals to mainstream consumers. The Apple of VPNs, everything "just works" and is easy to understand.

Do mainstream consumers really need a VPN?
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