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Tailscale is pretty useful

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Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#61
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just works, literally. I haven’t tried nord, but I’ve got clients on Mac, Linux, windows, rpis, it all just works. I used to run pivpn, but the key exchange magic Tailscale employs is so much simpler and it somehow works on networks blocking unknown packets like the pivpn I had set up on some random udp port.

How is it on Android? Tried different vpns to access my pihole but its really slow at resolving sometimes.

Android is the only major OS I haven’t tried, but given its Linux roots I’d assume it’s first tier.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#62
> I have used Tailscale only for personal reasons so far, using the free tier; they have enterprise plans for enterprise use cases that I have no idea about.

Does anybody know of any good materials on the enterprise use cases and configs? e.g. blogs, screencasts, etc.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#63
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just works, literally. I haven’t tried nord, but I’ve got clients on Mac, Linux, windows, rpis, it all just works. I used to run pivpn, but the key exchange magic Tailscale employs is so much simpler and it somehow works on networks blocking unknown packets like the pivpn I had set up on some random udp port.

How is it on Android? Tried different vpns to access my pihole but its really slow at resolving sometimes.

I use it on android to talk to my synology and a proxmox server at my house from anywhere.

It comes in handy from time to time. I run a "public" subsonic server but I don't have most of my own productions on it, but I can open VLC on android and go to a bookmarked share and play it all there.

Also stuff like NVR camera feeda I can look at over tailscale, too. No "cloud" storage needed.

I wish there was an easy reliable way to do this that didn't involve a for-profit; but until awful things happen I am fine using this for low-friction, trivial network access.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#64
post #47

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

Use headscale: https://headscale.net/stable/

What are the primary downsides of self-hosting this? The top issues that come to mind:

1. Maintaining high availability

2. Dealing with patches/upgrades

But I'm also really curious how likely a self-hosted instance is to be an attack vector potentially more dangerous than using something like Tailscale.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#65
post #41

CGNAT _can_ make it easier to access your server. If your Internet provider and your mobile provider is the same company, they could put all your connected devices in the same IP block within the CGNAT IP range. Now, not only you can access your device at home while away using your cellphone, you can also connect to your partner's phone with the same IP address at (or away from) home. Some Internet providers in China…

Lol I will be seriously surprised if at&t offers this, but I can see the tmo starlink thing potentially doing it.

I signed up for the tmo beta even though I am not a tmo subscriber. Now I have a cool thing to test, can I access my behind-starlink stuff from my cellphone?

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#66

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

Yeah, I don't understand how it is so prevalent in the self-hosted community. I would never install this on my server, just use wireguard/openvpn ...

edit: okay, CGNAT

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#67

I use tailscale to build my personal podcast that include local weather and stocks I interested in. Running the whole pipeline on a steamdeck and use tailscale to securely delivery the generated podcast to my phone.

How are you going from weather and stock information to a podcast? Is there some sort of TTS step there?

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#69
I use it extensively as well.

- My home PC, my laptop, and my phone are the participants.

- My home PC is connected to a GPU, and runs a colab runtime, SSHD, as well as a simple http file server in $HOME (actually, C:/Users/username, its windows)

- My laptop doesn't have an NVIDIA GPU, so it just runs SSHD and a file server.

- My phone serves nothing, but has an SSH client, and a http client obviously.

There is simple hostname based DNS setup by tailscale automatically, so I can just go to http://laptop:8000 to access all my files, or just ssh to username@computer

Accessing everything from everywhere is absolutely great. And this is all on their free tier.

Unrelated to tailscale, I use parsec for a similar solution for remote desktop, their "machine level user" feature allows me to initiate remote desktop from certain client devices directly.

Too smooth.

Re: Tailscale is pretty useful

#70

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

I trust Tailscale with my network traffic. I also trust a $50 cheap chinese 10G switch that I bought off amazon with a terrible and surely insecure management interface. Which is to say - I don't, but I don't need to trust it far.

I do have enough trust in their client that's installed on my machine to believe that it's not actively malicious. I do trust that I can find my other devices, and trust tailscale to keep a list of them, and not randomly add other devices that I don't know, but I don't have perfect trust of that. All my internal services are still E2E encrypted over the Wireguard link; They run HTTPS with an internal cert authority. There's not ports open on them that shouldn't be, and while it's possible that one of them still gets popped, it's much less likely.

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