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How Tailscale Works

tailscale.com

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Re: How Tailscale Works

#41

Post by tux21b »

aliswe wrote: post #40

A more relevant question for me is What is Tailscale? Didn't get that from either the article or really from the start page. Is it a VPN with "networking features"?

I guess you can call it that. You can start it on all your devices (e.g. laptop, PC, phone, tablet, Docker containers, etc.) and it will assign a fixed IP to each of them. Using this fixed IP all those devices are able to communicate securely with each other, no matter where those devices are located at the moment. Tailscale discovers the fastest, direct route between each device and routes the packages accordingly.

Example: Start it on all your devices and you can always access the shared files from your PC at home on your phone or tablet, no matter where you are. If you happen to be at home, no packages will be sent over your internet connection (so you can easily use it to stream 4k movies for example), but the way to access those files is always the same (fixed IP) and always secure.

An additional advantage of Wireguard (which is used behind the scenes) is that it maintains a strict mapping of IP addresses and identities. Therefore, you can usually restrict access to services by IP (instead of using TLS certificates or complicated authentication mechanisms).

Re: How Tailscale Works

#42

Post by nif2ee »

HN promoted Tailscale worth of million dollars of advertising so far for free. This is really disgusting and the biggest proof that relations >>> product.

Rename this website to Tailscale News.

Re: How Tailscale Works

#43

Post by ngrilly »

Great post! Can Tailscale be used to create a network between 10,000 IoT devices and a few servers? Is it scalable enough to support 10,000 peers on each node? Is it possible to script the registration of each IoT device to the control plane?

Re: How Tailscale Works

#44

Post by jrockway »

nif2ee wrote: post #42

HN promoted Tailscale worth of million dollars of advertising so far for free. This is really disgusting and the biggest proof that relations >>> product. Rename this website to Tailscale News.

I mean... the people that founded the company have been long time contributors to the site. You've probably read a hundred of Avery's articles here.

What are you doing that's interesting? Post it here and you can get the free advertising too.

Re: How Tailscale Works

#45

Post by neophyt3 »

from where can I learn the fundamentals on this topic. I tried searching for data plane but most of them are k8s specific and few of them were pointing to layer3 of OSI model but I couldn't understand maybe my fundamentals are not too strong.Any reference such as books or articles will be much appreciated

Re: How Tailscale Works

#46

Post by spydum »

Great write-up, when I checked out TS a month or more ago, documentation was severely lacking, and the repo wasnt out there. Lot of docs confused things as they talked about some logging services (pivoted product??).

In any case the one concern I had was the coordination server being able to add new nodes as another commenter mentioned. Indeed when I first set it up, they added some dev node for chat to my peers by default! That worries me a bit. You basically have to trust their coordinator is super secure. Otherwise if someone can abuse it, they could add nodes to your very private network.

Re: How Tailscale Works

#47

Post by ericcholis »

How much of a drop-in replacement is this for a Remote Desktop Gateway connecting through to users' workstations via RDP? Our users love RDP, but i'm more in love with the security that something like this could provide.

Re: How Tailscale Works

#48

Post by raoulj »

neophyt3 wrote: post #45

from where can I learn the fundamentals on this topic. I tried searching for data plane but most of them are k8s specific and few of them were pointing to layer3 of OSI model but I couldn't understand maybe my fundamentals are not too strong.Any reference such as books or articles will be much appreciated

This could be too high level, but I stumbled onto the founder's (crawshaw) website and found one of his blog posts very helpful for understanding basic fundamentals of the product (i.e. Zero Trust networks and microsegmentation)

https://crawshaw.io/blog/zero-trust

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