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Tailscale is pretty useful

blog.6nok.org

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Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#21

I love tailscale, but the performance overhead on file transfer (my primary use case for it) is very real. Samba transfers take a 15 megabyte per second hit over tailscale even with a fairly fast CPU on both ends (Ryzen 3600 and Ryzen 7900X3D) on my local network

15 MiB/s is trivially handled by any CPU you're likely to run. Indeed 100 MiB/s seems reasonable. 15 MiB/s cap seems either the protocol being used is doing too many round trips (assuming the machines you're testing with are far apart) or the network that's being set up requires routing through Tailscale's infra for hole punching.

Not a cap. It’s the delta. About 117megabytes a second measured by windows explorer to around 101.

These are on my local network, connected to my switch over 1gig Ethernet.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#22

> it’s no longer possible thanks to a cursed thing called CGNAT as someone who does publicly expose services that have auth, why does CGNAT make exposing ports publicly bad?

FYI my ISP (Aussie Broadband) will put you on a non-CGNAT subnet if you call and ask.

Tailscale is a better idea.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#23

I love tailscale, but the performance overhead on file transfer (my primary use case for it) is very real. Samba transfers take a 15 megabyte per second hit over tailscale even with a fairly fast CPU on both ends (Ryzen 3600 and Ryzen 7900X3D) on my local network

WG is quite fast. Can’t be the limiter. Like this guy I’ve driven 1 G easily on 7950 and Epyc 9654. I think I did 10 G but I can’t recall because at some point I just moved everything local and did 40 G. But I’m sure it would work on CPU on reasonable machine https://old.reddit.com/r/mikrotik/comments/112mo4v/is_there_...

Tailscale is using a user space implementation of WG on my Windows machine for obvious reasons - I am imagining that to be part of the bottleneck.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#24

> it’s no longer possible thanks to a cursed thing called CGNAT as someone who does publicly expose services that have auth, why does CGNAT make exposing ports publicly bad?

Other replies explained the why, though cgnat wouldn’t be a problem if you also had ipv6.

Luckily for me I have a regular ip4 address but if that ever changed I’d be out of luck unless my isp (quantum fibre) implemented a proper ipv6 solution.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#25
I have nothing but performance issues with tailscale. On both my iPhone and my iPad it _destroys_ my battery. It uses some 40+ hours of background time in just a few days. On my PC whenever I come back home and tailscale was running, everything is out of memory and not running correctly.

That's my experience. I wish it was better.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#26

The features here seem to be fairly standard with most the WireGuard based VPNs these days. For example, I use Nord for my use-case which is very similar to the author's. This allows me to rsync my home directory between my laptop, tablet, phone's Termux env, and desktop (all running Linux) to maintain configuration parity and file locality regardless of where I turn these devices on, so long as they have internet. D…

What other VPNs do mesh networking? I only know of zerotier (proprietary) and nebula (FOSS except that the Android app is proprietary)

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#27
I think for simple cases, it's great. If you have remote boxes somewhere that needs administration, it's awesome.

If you have more complex cases, the IPTables/Netfilter rules make it vastly more difficult to manage, particularly if you're running docker-compose (or anything using IPTables rules) on the same box and trying to troubleshoot the packets coming out of docker and going into tailscale.

And then trying to figure out what tailscale is doing with your packets is not great as well. They've also broken features I relied upon with a minor release.

Their nat traversal doesn't always work, as sometimes I get connected to a DERP server, so that limits the network speeds across the internet.

I blame CG-NAT quite a bit -- it's really why we can't have nice things these days -- and I get tailscale is trying to fix a bunch of that. But the reality is, I just want an interface just like eth0 or wl0, not an IT infrastructure to move my packets across.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#30

The features here seem to be fairly standard with most the WireGuard based VPNs these days. For example, I use Nord for my use-case which is very similar to the author's. This allows me to rsync my home directory between my laptop, tablet, phone's Termux env, and desktop (all running Linux) to maintain configuration parity and file locality regardless of where I turn these devices on, so long as they have internet. D…

The beauty of it is that you control it. And even scale it to console stuff. For my use, that’s desirable.

That said, I can totally see where a less DIY solution. VPNs fundamentally aren’t novel and there’s nothing wrong with Nord and similar products. (Although I don’t put any stock in the no logging claims)

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