Tailscale is pretty useful • Hacker News Board

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#301

Post by frontsideair » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 7:10 AM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #192

> But my old Raspberry Pi was too weak to run it, so I ended up uninstalling it, and unrelatedly my pet project grew out and has its place in the cloud now. It’s incredible how shitty modern software is that a raspberry pi couldn’t run a basic VPN. If any tailscale devs see this you should try to reproduce this issue and use it as an opportunity to clean up a bunch of dumb assumptions that likely hurt real users as w…

I saw from the comments that they provide smaller binaries, which may have worked on my Raspberry Pi. Maybe I’ll give it a try one day.

https://tailscale.com/kb/1207/small-tailscale

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#302

Post by frontsideair » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 7:12 AM UTC

sneak wrote: post #186

You can do all of this stuff with Nebula (from slack oss), without some centralized service. I use it on all my computers and it works great.

This is the first time I’m hearing about Nebula. How does it compare to Tailscale?

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#303

Post by LinAGKar » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 7:12 AM UTC

Tailscale is also crazy unreliable in my experience, at least on Android. It had to be force quit and restarted every day, and even outside of that apps would randomly get connection errors. And they don't seem to care about bug reports. I ended up switching to regular Wireguard, which has since been perfectly reliable.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#304

Post by eddythompson80 » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 7:46 AM UTC

mr_mitm wrote: post #298

parasubvert wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailscale isn’t really a VPN, it’s an OSI layer 5 for the TCP/IP world. It makes connectivity as easy as 90s LAN parties were. I use Tailscale - so I can do remote tech support on my 81 year old mother’s computer - So I can remote in to my desktop from anywhere with my mobile phone or iPad or Vision Pro or Steam Deck if I need a file or need to print something - watching streaming media from my home network when I’m…

I get all that, but why do you say it's not a VPN and then go on describe it as a VPN at length? Of course it's a VPN. Is it because lot of people are just using a VPN as a proxy replacement, watering down the original meaning of the word?

> Is it because lot of people are just using a VPN as a proxy replacement, watering down the original meaning of the word?

Yes. The question was about a “mainstream consumer”. While “mainstream” is always a moving target, today (in March 2025) that mainstream consumer believes that a VPN == NordVPN == ExpressVPN == what we call/know as a proxy.

NordVPN added some mesh features and you can CTRL-F this thread to find a confused person asking “how is tailscale different than Nord?”

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#305

Post by goodpoint » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 7:52 AM UTC

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

We should not.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#306

Post by EQYV » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 8:01 AM UTC

dharmab wrote: post #265

leoqa wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hosted an Arma 3 server via Tailscale with a bunch of non technical folks running the daemon using magic links b

I used to host an Arma 3 server using Kubernetes, I had a scalable set of headless clients to distribute the AI load. My friends called said it was the smoothest server they ever played on despite using hundreds of AI groups. With Tailscale I wouldn't have needed host networking enabled on the Pods, come to think of it.

What do you mean by AI groups in this case?

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#307

Post by ziofill » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 8:08 AM UTC

I love tailscale! I am now on vacation and all my devices can still use pihole running on a raspberry pi at home on the other side of the world. And it was trivial to set up!

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#308

Post by zimpenfish » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 8:10 AM UTC

sixothree wrote: post #274

zimpenfish wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On both my iPhone and my iPad it _destroys_ my battery. On my iPhone, I've not even noticed any battery problems whilst running Tailscale 24/7. Are you running it with an exit node that funnels all traffic? I've just got it active for my nodes which might be why it's basically doing nothing.

Default install. Very literally 20+ hours a day of background time.

Just checked on my phone - for the last 24 hours, Tailscale has 5m screen, 22h 45m background for less than 1% of battery usage (as in it shows "-" below the 1% entries.)

Can't remember what the default install is - do you have "VPN On Demand" turned on? That should keep it mostly idle unless you're actually talking to one of your nodes, I think?

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#309

Post by JFingleton » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 8:17 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #287

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if the average person will ever be willing to install a VPN app on all their devices. Of course the average person will be willing to install a VPN app: all it takes is a bit of internet censorship, blocking access to their favourite services, and some geofencing, where services limit access to them based on IP address. Just ask people from China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, UK, Germany, etc.

But what you're referring to as a "VPN app" is something very different than what the parent poster is referring to with respect to what Tailscale is. When you use services like NordVPN, Mullvad, Surfshark, etc., you're just installing a VPN client , and you're basically just using them as a reverse proxy to hide your IP address (present it as coming from another country). That is the use case you are talking about.…

Indeed. VPNs were originally created to allow secure remote connections to and between LANs. The whole privacy thing is a by-product, and they're not that great at it.

Tor exists and is far better at providing privacy.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#310

Post by bboreham » Thu, Mar 06, 2025, 8:22 AM UTC

9dev wrote: post #296

rudasn wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. `db` should resolve to all host ips? Wouldnt a load balancer make more sense in that scenario?

Consider `db` resolves to multiple A records: db. IN A 100.64.123.1 # prod-db-1. db. IN A 100.64.123.2 # prod-db-2. db. IN A 100.64.123.3 # prod-db-3. This is good for service discovery—e.g., you can configure something like RabbitMQ to discover cluster members from an A record—and it's nice for browsers, which will pick one host at random when connecting, which effectively is load balancing. In a usual setup, the pr…

Nit: the host is not picked at random, but according to the RFC3484 algorithm.

Since people typically don’t believe me about this, here it is from someone who has done a lot of networking programming:

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2012/01/03/getaddrinfo-with-roun...