Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 84 posts

Re: Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets

#51

Post by a_k_p »

joatmon-snoo wrote: post #45

This made me wonder what the oldest go-link (from inside Google) discoverable on the public internet is. The earliest I've found is from Nov 2009: https://github.com/google/closure-library/blame/11ed104958a2... . (The second closest I've found in another repo is in RE2 from Mar 2010, https://github.com/google/re2/blame/954656f47fe8fb505d4818da... - and yes, both of these existed prior to the listed date, but I'm goin…

Not just Google, every prominent silicon valley company such as Twitter, Facebook, Stripe, Square even JP Morgan has an internal go/.

Fascinating history of workplace search is that at Google and Stripe if you don't find any relevant document under go/, it will take you to your workplace search portal. Both Google and Stripe has built an internal document + file + people search portal called Moma and Stripe Home respectively.

You can read more about Stripe Home here - https://stripe.com/blog/stripe-home

Re: Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets

#52

Post by a_k_p »

Sebguer wrote: post #26
mlindner wrote: post #25

Is this a general thing? I thought it was specific to my former employer (F5). We used go/(foo) extensively and there was numerous hotlinks for all sorts of internal services as well as a pretty interesting interface to design your own. I had thought it was an internal service developed internally. It looks like our internal version was a lot better than this open source version, at least by the screenshots.

It originated at Google, but at this point most BigTech or places founded by former BigTech have their own version. There's even a SaaS version: https://www.golinks.io/

[dead]

Re: Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets

#53

Post by umeshunni »

fragmede wrote: post #42
CommitSyn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was thinking about asking here if anyone could give a brief yet full overview of what exactly tailscale is and who/how it benefits. I've read about it, but I still don't get it.

Assume all your machines have Internet access, which they probably do these days. Instead of having to create firewall rules and routes and that whole mess in order to connect to a machine on "the inside" somewhere, the machine reaches out to the Internet and creates a tunnel, and you connect to the machine through that tunnel.

Isn't that a VPN?

Re: Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets

#55

Post by vhodges »

umeshunni wrote: post #53
fragmede wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume all your machines have Internet access, which they probably do these days. Instead of having to create firewall rules and routes and that whole mess in order to connect to a machine on "the inside" somewhere, the machine reaches out to the Internet and creates a tunnel, and you connect to the machine through that tunnel.

Isn't that a VPN?

Yes... but a painless and damn near zeroconf one. It's wireguard underneath.

Re: Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets

#56

Post by rkangel »

nehalem wrote: post #11

Big fan of Tailscale, yet I wonder whether it wouldn’t be better to make internal services securely available over the internet (zero trust rather than castle-and-moat). On the other hand, the former might be just to expensive for smaller organisations.

Tailscale is an alternative architectural approach to doing exactly that. It's a single point-of-auth for a lot of internal services, that you can access from anywhere. It handles it at a completely different layer, but isn't fundamentally different.

Re: Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets

#57

Post by rkangel »

jhoechtl wrote: post #16

I started reading bout tailnet and still have no clue what it is

A tailnet is sometimes also called an 'overlay network'. The tailscale system sets up VPN links from all your devices to each other. This means they can act like they are all on one local network together, while not having to worry about the physical network setup the traffic is being carried on.

Re: Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets

#58

Post by dijit »

ha!

A few months ago I tried to find a URL shortner that fit the bill, I was reading "Software Engineering at Google" and came across information regarding their internal `go/` URL.

I couldn't find anything, so I threw something together with Rust (using rocket), and gave it the ability to have static and dynamic backends, the dynamic backend would allow you to submit a link very easily.

a working example (with a static backend) is here: https://go.competition.company

I never got access to the real go/ service from google, so I wonder what I'm missing.

Heres the code: https://github.com/dijit/redirector-rs

Re: Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets

#59

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

petercooper wrote: post #50
jhoechtl wrote: post #16

I started reading bout tailnet and still have no clue what it is

It's a term they've had to invent because the term "VPN" has been twisted into being synonymous with "proxy server" nowadays, but really a tailnet is a VPN (not a proxy!) A tailnet is a true "virtual private network" in the sense that it's a non-physically defined network to which which numerous devices can connect and see each other directly. The underlying physical network, a layer below, is (mostly) irrelevant to…

From a purely networking perspective, there are far better solutions than tailscale.

Have a look at full mesh VPNs like:

https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/yggdrasil-go

https://github.com/gsliepen/tinc

https://github.com/costela/wesher

These build actual mesh networks where every node is equal and can serve as a router for other nodes to resolve difficult network topologies (where some nodes might not be connected to the internet, but do have connections to other nodes with an internet connection — I work with networks like that every day).

Sending data through multiple routers is also possible. They also deal with nodes disappearing and change routes accordingly.

tailscale (and similar solutions like netbird) still use a bunch of "proxy servers" for that. You can set them up on intermediate nodes, but that have to be dealt with manually (and you get two kinds of nodes). You also have to create routes for the node to be able to access the control server.

Re: Golink: A private shortlink service for tailnets

#60

Post by csande17 »

CommitSyn wrote: post #37
bpanon wrote: post #35

A few weeks back, I installed Tailscale on a Friday and the following Sunday my machine (ubuntu 22.10) was hacked and running mining/tracking software and rsyslog. I only noticed because my fans were spinning harder than usual. caveat emptor

Ouch. CVE-2022-41924 Severe 9.6 A vulnerability identified in the Tailscale Windows client allows a malicious website to reconfigure the Tailscale daemon `tailscaled`, which can then be used to remotely execute code. In the Tailscale Windows client, the local API was bound to a local TCP socket, and communicated with the Windows client GUI in cleartext with no Host header verification. This allowed an attacker-contro…

I wonder if this golink service is also vulnerable to DNS rebinding. Briefly looking at the code, it seems likely: it relies on Tailscale's usual "assume anyone who can connect to the service is authorized" security model and doesn't check the Host header. But maybe there's some mitigation I'm missing.
Post reply on HN