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How Tailscale Works

tailscale.com

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Re: How Tailscale Works

#21

Post by zamubafoo »

Oh man, I have a PoC of something like this written up in Python. I was more targeting a OpenVPN replacement than a mesh network, but it'd literally just be changing the central server's backend with something like etcd.

Good job on open sourcing your work and best of luck.

Re: How Tailscale Works

#23

Post by skrebbel »

crawshaw wrote: post #7
mindfulplay wrote: post #2

Is there any page that describes how to actually get VPN work end to end with tailscale? I am a newbie and would like to understand.

Install the client on two devices and log in with a Gmail account. That's it. They'll be assigned IPs and can reach each other. (I'm a co-founder of Tailscale.)

what's local networking got to do with gmail?

Re: How Tailscale Works

#24

Post by crawshaw »

dochtman wrote: post #16

I was wondering, does this work with any domains that advertise (for example) OpenID Connect, or does it require one of the well-known providers?

It can, though right now we only expose a few well-known providers. For business customers we can add providers, send us an email!

Hopefully we can make this self-serve at some point. It's on the TODO list.

(Tailscale co-founder)

Re: How Tailscale Works

#25

Post by crawshaw »

forgot_old_user wrote: post #22

Really fascinating work! I enjoyed reading this article. Do you actually have tunnels between every device? Wondering, how does this scale?

Tunnels are created between any two devices that try to talk.

It scales great, not concentrating connections makes it easy. Tunnels are very lightweight and the only machines with lots of tunnels are servers that are already provisioned for talking to lots of machines.

(Tailscale co-founder)

Re: How Tailscale Works

#26

Post by TheDong »

skrebbel wrote: post #23
crawshaw wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install the client on two devices and log in with a Gmail account. That's it. They'll be assigned IPs and can reach each other. (I'm a co-founder of Tailscale.)

what's local networking got to do with gmail?

There needs to be a mechanism to distribute keys to nodes / authenticate nodes / associate nodes.

Tailscale offers a centralized server to allow nodes to provision themselves. It bootstraps that trust/account system of of logging in with some account, such as via a google oauth login.

Re: How Tailscale Works

#27

Post by forgot_old_user »

crawshaw wrote: post #25
forgot_old_user wrote: post #22

Really fascinating work! I enjoyed reading this article. Do you actually have tunnels between every device? Wondering, how does this scale?

Tunnels are created between any two devices that try to talk. It scales great, not concentrating connections makes it easy. Tunnels are very lightweight and the only machines with lots of tunnels are servers that are already provisioned for talking to lots of machines. (Tailscale co-founder)

Interesting :) Follow up, trying to cement my understanding here. If two devices may talk to each other (as defined in the ACL), only then they get to know each other's public keys, right? If so, how would this ACL be negated later- do the devices forget eachother after this disallow?

Re: How Tailscale Works

#29

Post by loeg »

notlukesky wrote: post #14
crawshaw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailscale co-founder here: that's the guts of all the clients. (It almost works on macOS too as is, just a little more work to do.) We are still open sourcing our code, there's more to come but we haven't found the time to clean it up and get it ready to release. Soon hopefully!

What license schemes etc? Also how do you integrate with IdPs? Are you a SAML service provider? If so where is the documentation for it?

My dude: https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/blob/master/LICENSE
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