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Tailscale raises $100M

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Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#221

Post by yeswecatan »

newaccount74 wrote: post #141
siavosh wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty ignorant on this topic, but what are the benefits of having a personal VPN?

I use it so I can connect to my work machine (dynamic IP on office wifi) from my laptop (dynamic IP, home Wifi). It's also great to be able to just ssh into your laptop at home when you're at work and you forgot to push whatever you were working on last night. It's not necessary, but Tailscale makes a lot of things just easier.

> It's also great to be able to just ssh into your laptop at home when you're at work and you forgot to push whatever you were working on last night.

What's the difference between using Tailscale for this and just opening the port on your router?

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#222

Post by vgel »

rhuber wrote: post #167
JeremyNT wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, this is why I won't use it either. I settled on Slack's Nebula [0] instead of wireguard because it handles direct p2p communication between nodes automatically. There also exists an open source implementation of the tailscale control server [1] that you could self host. [0] https://github.com/slackhq/nebula [1] https://github.com/juanfont/headscale

(Nebula coauthor here) People sometimes ask me to describe the differences between Nebula and Tailscale. One of the most important relates to performance and scale. Nebula can handle the amount of internal network traffic and scalability of nodes (100k+ nodes, constant churn) required on a large network like Slack's, but Tailscale cannot. Tailscale's performance is fine for many situations, but not suitable for infra…

> People sometimes ask me to describe the differences between Nebula and Tailscale. One of the most important relates to performance and scale. Nebula can handle the amount of internal network traffic and scalability of nodes (100k+ nodes, constant churn) required on a large network like Slack's, but Tailscale cannot. Tailscale's performance is fine for many situations, but not suitable for infrastructure. It is just a fundamentally different set of goals.

Making broad claims like this without a source or links to benchmarks feels like FUD to me. For example Tailscale's comparison page on performance (https://tailscale.com/kb/1148/tailscale-vs-nebula/#performan...) doesn't mention a meaningful performance difference, so if you're claiming they're not telling the truth (by omission), I'd hope to see more to that than just a straight assertion, even just "We tried Tailscale in Slack's network and it wasn't able to keep up with our usage patterns".

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#223

Post by rhuber »

vgel wrote: post #222
rhuber wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Nebula coauthor here) People sometimes ask me to describe the differences between Nebula and Tailscale. One of the most important relates to performance and scale. Nebula can handle the amount of internal network traffic and scalability of nodes (100k+ nodes, constant churn) required on a large network like Slack's, but Tailscale cannot. Tailscale's performance is fine for many situations, but not suitable for infra…

> People sometimes ask me to describe the differences between Nebula and Tailscale. One of the most important relates to performance and scale. Nebula can handle the amount of internal network traffic and scalability of nodes (100k+ nodes, constant churn) required on a large network like Slack's, but Tailscale cannot. Tailscale's performance is fine for many situations, but not suitable for infrastructure. It is just…

Another fair criticism. We will publish the benchmarks and make them repeatable (which most existing ones I've found don't bother to do). We hadn't done so because Tailscale isn't really seen as a direct competitor to what the Nebula project is doing, but if people want numbers, that's a thing we are happy to provide.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#224

Post by zanny »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #146
nickysielicki wrote: post #111

Tailscale has a fantastic product, I’ve been extremely happy from day one. If you’re waiting for a weekend to have a few hours to try out Tailscale, don’t, it takes 15 minutes to get every device you own up and running and talking. This is the lowest friction personal VPN to ever exist, and once you see how easy it is for your own devices, you’ll wish you had it at work. The biggest risk that this company has is that…

> a direct ring of trust with friends The vision you outlined is great, except it doesn't work. The trust assumptions are too high, and even a great product like Tailscale seems to rely completely on centralized identity providers (you have to choose Google, Microsoft, or Github on sign-in). Ultimately, if you want to maintain full control of your online identity and network, you'll probably need some of the decentra…

I self host headscale as my control node of my tailscale vpn so no sign ins required, I just give keys out to anyone I want in my vpn.

My problem is the client doesn't support multiple servers, so I can't have a work vpn and a home vpn, not even with an easy toggle - you have to run tailscale with different conf options for both. Changing namespaces also isn't easy, so having friends and family segregated even on one server is also a pain point.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#225

Post by rrix2 »

karlshea wrote: post #162
gzer0 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am able to route traffic on my mobile device through my home network via the use of their "exit node" option. It allows one of my home devices to act as an exit node for my entire personal tailscale network. This serves multiple benefits: the main one being that I receive pi-hole filtered ad-free traffic on my mobile device via a Wireguard VPN with my home IP 24/7/365

I can do that without Tailscale though by just using the WireGuard app. What is Tailscale adding to this?

not having to generate, manage, and distribute wireguard secrets and configurations was good enough reason for me to switch.

Tailscale also provides a "magic DNS" service which lets you resolve your Tailscale device names without setting up unbound etc, and which can relay other requests through to your pi-hole or unbound or whatever, which can then listen only on the tailscale IP address, so no need to run an open resolver or deal with source IP filtering.

e: also, you can share devices between tailscale users without generating, managing, distributing wireguard secrets. You send your pal/partner/kid a link and they can access your fileserver or raspberry pi webserver or pihole server for themselves wherever they are.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#226

Post by throwaway894345 »

skoskie wrote: post #199
throwaway894345 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I haven't noticed and I use 1Password on all of my devices every day. I heard some grumblings about 1Password changing to electron months ago and just assumed that they already made the transition. In whatever case, I haven't heard a peep until this thread. I don't like electron in theory and the industry should collectively come up with a solution that incentivizes app developers away from electron rather t…

You might double check which version you’re on. Might still be on v7. > the industry should collectively come up with a solution that incentivizes app developers away from electron rather than hoping they swim against the current of incentive. They have the financial resources to build it in ~Rust but still chose electron. It’s a mind boggling decision.

> They have the financial resources to build it in ~Rust but still chose electron. It’s a mind boggling decision.

Respectfully, I think you may misunderstand the company’s mission.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#227

Post by throw0101a »

zinekeller wrote: post #117
throw0101a wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if everyone went IPv6 and gave every device a public IP address, pretty much every network would have a firewall that behaved just like NAT. No, they do not behave just like NAT. With NAT you have two problems: * figuring out your address * firewall hole punching With IPv6 you already know your address and just give it to the peer you are communicating with. You then tell your firewall to allow connections fro…

No, no, no, no. You haven't really experienced the quality of IPv6 routers at home. The only thing that I can (probably) say with confidence is you will not need TURN, and even that assumption can be broken with even more restrictive firewalls that block nearly all UDP traffic or even not know your real public address because IPv6 NAT does exist ( https://blogs.infoblox.com/ipv6-coe/you-thought-there-was-no... , http…

> No, no, no, no. You haven't really experienced the quality of IPv6 routers at home.

I've been running IPv6 at home >2 years. You're telling me that my own experience is invalid?

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#228

Post by xena »

adtac wrote: post #191

>To put the market in perspective, there are VPNs that only work if [...] UDP isn’t blocked isn't that true with WireGuard/Tailscale too?

Tailscale employee here. Tailscale has a fallback that does connections to a relay server called DERP. DERP works over HTTPS, so if you can't access the outside world via HTTPS then you have much bigger problems than Tailscale not working.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#229

Post by rhuber »

JeremyNT wrote: post #194
rhuber wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Nebula coauthor here) People sometimes ask me to describe the differences between Nebula and Tailscale. One of the most important relates to performance and scale. Nebula can handle the amount of internal network traffic and scalability of nodes (100k+ nodes, constant churn) required on a large network like Slack's, but Tailscale cannot. Tailscale's performance is fine for many situations, but not suitable for infra…

> Fwiw, I even recommend Tailscale to friends who want to do things like connect to their Plex server or Synology or [other thing] at home remotely. It simplifies this kind of thing greatly and doesn't require you to set up any infrastructure you control directly, which can be a headache for folks who just want to reach a handful of computers/devices. First thanks for working on Nebula! It's great. Nebula seems to be…

The Nebula CA we built at Slack was very specific to Slack's internal devops, and just wasn't generalizable. It is highly automated there, and is custom tooling, just as you describe. The open source version is somewhat bare bones (a command line tool for CA vs something like vault).

I will say that the OSS tooling of Nebula is everything someone needs to stand up an entire working network on every common platform (linux/mac/windows/ios/android), but there is a definite gap in simplification that we need to address to make it easier for smaller scale use cases.

We actually have a managed enterprise Nebula offering at my current gig, but that's rather a different market than Tailscale, so I'm avoiding talking as that company as opposed to a Nebula OSS project lead. The commercial offering is targeted at large enterprises, because that's the market where Nebula has unique advantages. It also means we don't currently have a freemium or smb type offering, and are not prioritizing creating one at all. I don't want to give people false hope that we will, and would prefer to see the OSS project improve to address the small-medium use cases.

Re: Tailscale raises $100M

#230

Post by zinekeller »

throw0101a wrote: post #227
zinekeller wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no, no, no. You haven't really experienced the quality of IPv6 routers at home. The only thing that I can (probably) say with confidence is you will not need TURN, and even that assumption can be broken with even more restrictive firewalls that block nearly all UDP traffic or even not know your real public address because IPv6 NAT does exist ( https://blogs.infoblox.com/ipv6-coe/you-thought-there-was-no... , http…

> No, no, no, no. You haven't really experienced the quality of IPv6 routers at home. I've been running IPv6 at home >2 years. You're telling me that my own experience is invalid?

No, not necessarily, but if you're using an aftermarket router rather than an ISP-supplied router, then this rather long list is not applicable to you.
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